Simon Willison’s Weblog

• New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146
• Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan. #137

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash (and 3.8 Flash Cyber, but that's available to "trusted defenders" only) today.

Here are the pelicans for high, medium, and low. This is high:

For comparison, here are the same pelicans generated using Gemini 3.7 Flash.

Something I appreciate about Gemini Flash is that it's fast, cheap, and competent at things like HTML and JavaScript. I was messing around with it and prompted "make me a cool thing in html" and it built this, which is certainly a cool thing in HTML! Took 13 seconds, cost 1.8 cents.

If you click through to the demo you'll see one more thing I built with Gemini 3.8 Flash.

My markdown-svg-renderer tool lets me feed in the URL to a Gist with Markdown in and renders that markdown with fenced code blocks for SVG correctly rendered.

I used Gemini 3.8 Flash (with my very basic llm-coding-agent coding agent plugin) to add support for HTML as well, so now any HTML blocks in the Markdown are rendered using a sandboxed iframe. Here's the transcript.