Google has pushed early access to a souped-up Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview ahead of their I/O 2025 developer conference in a couple of weeks.
Why the hurry? Well, Google put it down to “overwhelming enthusiasm” and the “amazing things” developers were already cooking up with the previous version of Gemini 2.5 Pro. It seems they’re champing at the bit to get these beefed-up capabilities into the wild.
This isn’t just a fresh lick of paint. The company is championing this new version based on the “overwhelmingly positive feedback” received for the original Gemini 2.5 Pro, especially when it came to coding and its ability to juggle different types of information.
We’re told to expect “meaningful improvements for front-end and UI development,” which will be music to the ears of many web developers. But the good news doesn’t stop there; the enhancements reportedly reach deep into the coding toolkit, covering tricky code transformations, detailed code editing, and even the development of those clever agentic workflows – AI systems that can pretty much run tasks on their own.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, or in this case, the leaderboards. Gemini 2.5 Pro has now snatched the top spot on the WebDev Arena leaderboard, outperforming its predecessor by a hefty +147 Elo points. For those not keeping score, this leaderboard is a big deal; it’s where human experts rate how well AI models can build websites that not only work smoothly but also look the business.
This leap on the leaderboard suggests a genuine step forward in AI’s ability to help create truly polished, user-friendly web experiences. Google also mentions that this leading edge is already “powering Cursor’s innovative code agent” and fuelling collaborations with bright sparks at companies like Cognition and Replit, all pushing together at “the frontiers of agentic programming.”
Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, said: “We’re excited about the latest Gemini 2.5 Pro, which builds on its already strong real-world coding capabilities. We’re observing internally that the new model has a significant reduction in its failure to call tools, an improvement we believe our users will find makes 2.5 Pro even more effective than before in Cursor.”
Michele Catasta, President of Replit, added: “We found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the best frontier model when it comes to ‘capability over latency’ ratio. I look forward to rolling it out on Replit Agent whenever a latency-sensitive task needs to be accomplished with a high degree of reliability.”
According to Silas Alberti from the founding team of Cognition, the updated Gemini 2.5 Pro “achieves leading performance” on its junior-dev evals. It was the first-ever model that solved one of its evals “involving a larger refactor of a request routing backend.”
Alberti says the updated Gemini 2.5 Pro feels “like a more senior developer because it was able to make correct judgement calls and choose good abstractions.” This suggests the AI isn’t just churning out code; it’s starting to show a more nuanced understanding of development challenges.
Beyond the hardcore coding, Gemini 2.5 Pro still flexes its muscles with its ability to understand different types of media and handle a ton of information in one go. Google is particularly proud of its “state-of-the-art performance in video understanding,” and they’ve got the numbers to back it up: an 84.8% score on the VideoMME benchmark. Marry this video savvy with its coding skills, and you get some genuinely new possibilities.
Take the ‘Video to Learning App’ example they’re showing off in Google AI Studio – it can whip up an interactive learning app just from a single YouTube video:
So, what does this mean for developers day-to-day? Well, building out new features, especially for the front-end of websites, could get a whole lot less fiddly. Normally, this involves a lot of painstaking work, diving into design files, squinting at components to match styles like colours, fonts, padding, and borders, and then manually hammering out the CSS.
Google suggests you could use Gemini 2.5 Pro in your coding editor to generate new bits, like adding a video player that perfectly matches the style of your existing app:
Got a cool idea for an app but dread the slog of making it both work well and look good? Gemini 2.5 Pro wants to be your new best friend here. Google points to a new dictation app, built with this updated model, as a prime example. They draw attention to nifty details like “the wavelength animations, responsive design, and subtle button hover effects.”
The model has a “real taste for aesthetic web development” by default, while still letting developers steer it, helping them quickly turn a concept into a working web app. In fact, Gemini 2.5 Pro apparently designed and coded the microphone UI animation for that dictation app itself.
For developers keen to dive in, the updated Gemini 2.5 Pro is ready and waiting via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, and for the big enterprise players, it’s available through Vertex AI. It’s also being woven into the regular Gemini app that everyday users can access, powering features like Canvas and even letting folks “vibe code” – basically, letting anyone build interactive web apps with just a simple prompt.
The best part for developers already using Gemini 2.5 Pro? This upgrade should be pretty seamless. The old version (03-25) now automatically points to this newer, shinier one (05-06), so there’s nothing you need to do to start using the improved model, and it’s all at the same price.
Google also says this new version specifically tackles some key bits of developer feedback, like “reducing errors in function calling and improving function calling trigger rates.” And, of course, the official model card has been updated with all the new details.
By getting these polished features into developers’ hands ahead of the I/O fanfare, Google isn’t just responding to eager users; they’re speeding up that crucial feedback process that helps make these tools even better.
With its sharp focus on practical, real-world coding – from complex back-end rethinks to nifty UI generation – Gemini 2.5 Pro is shaping up to be an even more invaluable ally for anyone building software.
(Image credit: Google)
See also: AI is changing software development, but not always for the better
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