There are some clear objective signals that aren’t just user preference. I shelled out the $250 for Gemini’s top tier and am profoundly disappointed. I had forgotten that loops were still a thing. I’ve hit this multiple times in Gemini CLI, and in different projects. It gets stuck in a loop (as in the exact same, usually nonsense, message over and over) and the automated loop detection stops the whole operation. It also stops in the middle of an operation very frequently. I don’t hit either of these in Claude Code or Codex.

There certainly is some user preference, but the deal breakers are flat out shortcomings that other tools solved (in AI terms) long ago. I haven’t dealt with agent loops since March with any other tool.