My AI Model Tier List for mid-2026

Gemini is… weird. I have it (via GitHub Copilot) on every machine I use and have reached for it on almost none of them. It rides along in my agent containers “for kicks”, it’s the third pane in a Copilot side-by-side I mostly use to confirm I prefer the other two, and I can’t remember it ever fixing any of the stuff I handed over to Codex–I’ve never found a reason to start selling out to Gemini with actual money. This leaves Gemini in the least useful category: a model I have everywhere and no reason to choose. It has one strength I’ve pinned down, and an unsurprising one–architecting Go packages–but I’ve never had the patience to see it through a whole project because nothing it did made me want to keep going. The joke, of course, is that it’s the model everyone is going to use without choosing it: Apple Foundation Models are derived from Gemini, so half the people who’d never install it are running it by proxy. Nobody picks Gemini. Source: My AI Model Tier List for mid-2026 This is…