That matches my experience as well. Gemini 2.5 Pro seems better at writing code from scratch, but Claude 3.7 seems much better at refactoring my existing code.
Gemini also seems more likely to come up with 'advanced' ideas (for better or worse). I for example asked both for a fast C++ function to solve an on the surface fairly simple computational geometry problem. Claude solved it in a straight ahead and obvious way. Nothing obviously inefficient, will perform reasonably well for all inputs, but also left some performance on the table. I could also tell at a glance that it was almost certainly correct.
Gemini on the other hand did a bunch of (possibly) clever 'optimisations' and tricks, plus made extensive use of OpenMP. I know from experience that those optimisations will only be faster if the input has certain properties, but will be a massive overhead in other, quite common, cases.
With a bit more prompting and questions from my part I did manage to get both Gemini and Claude to converge on pretty much the same final answer.
Gemini also seems more likely to come up with 'advanced' ideas (for better or worse). I for example asked both for a fast C++ function to solve an on the surface fairly simple computational geometry problem. Claude solved it in a straight ahead and obvious way. Nothing obviously inefficient, will perform reasonably well for all inputs, but also left some performance on the table. I could also tell at a glance that it was almost certainly correct.
Gemini on the other hand did a bunch of (possibly) clever 'optimisations' and tricks, plus made extensive use of OpenMP. I know from experience that those optimisations will only be faster if the input has certain properties, but will be a massive overhead in other, quite common, cases.
With a bit more prompting and questions from my part I did manage to get both Gemini and Claude to converge on pretty much the same final answer.