Most launch charts I have seen show the new model winning everything, which is why the Gemini 4 Argon chart caught my attention. It wins plenty and loses in a few places that matter a lot to anyone who spends their day in a terminal, and I trust that kind of chart more.

I have a habit with launch posts that I am not especially proud of. I skip the headline number and hunt for the row where the model loses, because that row usually decides whether I am actually going to use it or not. A model gets picked for the one irritating kind of work that fills someone's week, and the average of forty benchmarks says very little about how that work will go.

With Argon, the story is at the bottom of the table, and it is the reason this article exists. The same model that takes first place on repository-level software engineering sits well behind on terminal work, and it is also a model where one careless API call can run to $10 or $20.…