Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google's third budget model in six weeks while frontier models remain MIA

Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash, the third Flash model in six weeks, matches Claude Opus 5 on some agentic coding benchmarks at lower cost. But its "working harder" reasoning burns about 30 percent more output tokens per task, making it pricier in practice than its predecessor despite identical token rates. The article Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google's third budget model in six weeks while frontier models…