Qwen or Gemini?
As I previously stated, I’m a latecomer to AI. But AI has really come into its own, as they say, in 2026.
I started with Qwen, which I found fantastic to begin with. It explained medical lab results in a totally reassuring way, differentiated between oat, soy, and cow milk, and answered queries about Tesla and BYD worldwide sales, plus a few dozen similar ones. You can tell I’m a curious type.
I eventually got around to asking about Textpattern coding with my Tramping New Zealand website upgrade. It was great with spelling out some options for responsive sliders and pop-up slideshows. I’d been using 2010 and 2012 plugin code that didn’t work on small screens. It laid out options and gave recommendations. I asked a dozen follow-up questions and made a choice.
Qwen guided me through the process. It did a lot of thinking before responding. A lot. But often, I’d install code, and it wouldn’t work straight away. I’d realise the problem, or not, and it would change the code accordingly. Sometimes this might take several iterations. It quickly forgot the recent context, got confused about which Textpattern version I was using, and that was starting to become a problem.
I asked it for alternatives for free coding AIs, and it gave some. The most obvious was Gemini, which can handle a huge context upload, and I found it was almost instantaneous.
That worked much better for my purposes. At least it was faster to come to the wrong conclusion, but I felt more productive overall.
Time for a switch.