I think I got decent results from Gemini 2.5 Pro (AIStudio version).
Her fork scraped the plate. It was a sound he’d noticed three nights ago. Not the tine-on-ceramic screech, but the specific resonance of the plate on the tabletop. A low, almost sub-audible hum that vibrated up through his own chair.
He put his water glass down, gently. The wobble was minute, a tiny seesaw over an invisible fulcrum. He watched the surface of the water shiver, the reflection of the overhead light distorting and re-forming.
“It’s the floor,” she said. She was watching his eyes, not the glass. “It’s always been the floor.”
He pushed his chair back and knelt, his cheek almost to the cool laminate. He sighted along the gap under the table’s far leg. A sliver of light. He rocked the table with his fingertips. The contact point shifted.
“It’s not the floor,” he said, standing up. “The load isn’t distributed evenly. One of the leg screws has probably settled.”
She took a bite of her salad. “We could put a coaster under it.”
He looked at the small pile of mail on the counter. A folded piece of junk mail, a cardboard insert from a package. A temporary, imperfect patch. He felt a familiar, low-grade resistance in his chest.
He went to the hall closet and came back with his toolkit. He knelt again, the cool metal of a hex key in his hand. He found the screw head on the offending leg. It was tight. He tried the adjacent one. Also tight. He lay on his back, the ceiling light bright in his eyes, and began systematically checking them all, a quarter-turn to test, then back.
From his new vantage point, the apartment was an unfamiliar landscape. The underside of her chair, the dust bunnies gathered around the baseboard, the scuff mark on the wall where the vacuum cleaner had hit it. He heard her stand up and carry her plate to the sink. The scrape of the fork was gone. The water ran.
He found it on the fourth leg. A fractional looseness. He gave the screw a half-turn, then another. The wood groaned slightly as the tension equalized. He slid out from under the table and stood, brushing dust from his shirt.
He placed his palms flat on the tabletop and leaned his weight onto it. Nothing. Rock solid. He looked toward the sink.
She was standing there, scrolling on her phone, her back to him. The TV was on, muted. A city street at night, the headlights and taillights rendered as slow, continuous ribbons of red and white light. He watched her thumb move up the screen, fast and smooth. He waited for her to turn around.
Could be tightened a fair bit. Since that is my biggest criticism, it feels pretty promising. Getting this took your prompt, a free-association mash of words for the system prompt, and telling Gemini that the first story it produced was terrible.
Agree that this is pretty good! Maybe Gemini is where it’s at for flash fiction length prose right now. Embarrassingly, I’ve never really played with it, just OpenAI and Anthropic’s offerings. Perhaps this is what will make me take the plunge into a third dedicated AI tab.
It does have the hallmark weaknesses a bit (“it’s always been the floor” is pretty cringe) but in a low enough dose as to be fully tolerable, at least for me.
Personally, I liked “it’s always been the floor”. Feels real. I’ve certainly said/heard people say things like that in strained relationships. Perhaps “it’s always the floor” would have been better. Or “it always is”. Yes, that sounds right.
Yeah, hard for me to tease out what flinches in me come from a defensive posture with AI stuff vs. which are otherwise endogenous. Luckily for me, AI fic tends to cluster in my perception into two camps, one where the stuff I dislike is so overwhelming that it’s hard to imagine liking it, and one (like this one) where I occasionally go “hmm” but mostly feel gently impressed.
I think I got decent results from Gemini 2.5 Pro (AIStudio version).
Could be tightened a fair bit. Since that is my biggest criticism, it feels pretty promising. Getting this took your prompt, a free-association mash of words for the system prompt, and telling Gemini that the first story it produced was terrible.
Agree that this is pretty good! Maybe Gemini is where it’s at for flash fiction length prose right now. Embarrassingly, I’ve never really played with it, just OpenAI and Anthropic’s offerings. Perhaps this is what will make me take the plunge into a third dedicated AI tab.
It does have the hallmark weaknesses a bit (“it’s always been the floor” is pretty cringe) but in a low enough dose as to be fully tolerable, at least for me.
Personally, I liked “it’s always been the floor”. Feels real. I’ve certainly said/heard people say things like that in strained relationships. Perhaps “it’s always the floor” would have been better. Or “it always is”. Yes, that sounds right.
Yeah, hard for me to tease out what flinches in me come from a defensive posture with AI stuff vs. which are otherwise endogenous. Luckily for me, AI fic tends to cluster in my perception into two camps, one where the stuff I dislike is so overwhelming that it’s hard to imagine liking it, and one (like this one) where I occasionally go “hmm” but mostly feel gently impressed.