This article was originally published on avinashsangle.com.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google's new Flash-tier coding model, generally available since May 19, 2026. It scores 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 83.6% on MCP Atlas, beating Gemini 3.1 Pro on 11 of 15 benchmarks. Pricing is $1.50 input and $9 output per 1M tokens. For Claude Code users, it's the right model for tool-heavy agent loops, not a replacement for production code edits.
TL;DR
What it is: Gemini 3.5 Flash (GA May 19, 2026) is a Flash-tier model that outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks while costing 25% less per token than the Pro tier.
Pricing reality: $1.50/$9 per 1M tokens looks cheap, but it's 3x the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and runs about 5.5x more expensive per full benchmark suite according to Artificial Analysis.
