Gemini CLI

FWIW the fair comparison for Gemini 2.5 Pro would be o4-mini. That being said I’ve also found that Gemini is way better at getting it right on the first or second try and responding to corrections.

I did something very similar last week with Claude Code, which also had good results. Good to know Gemini CLI is on the same level of power.

<3 love to hear it!

conscious decision not to include it mostly to cut a release we could ship to land yesterday ;)

various forms of this are being discussed, this commentary is helpful thanks!

Would Gemini non-interactive mode be a stop gap if they don't have sub-agent equivalent yet?

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...

"sub-agent" sounds incredible! All tools should implement that.

On the one hand, yes this has obviously high immediate value; on the other hand, I can't help but feel like you are giving access to multiple tools that can be used for arbitrary code execution anyway (i.e. running tests, installing dependencies, or running any linter that has a plugin system...), so blacklisting `git --exec-path=/bin/sh` for example is... Misguided? You would have a better time containing the agent in an environment without internet access?

feedback is a gift - thank you!!

I believe Workspace users have to pay a separate subscription to use the Gemini CLI, the so-called “Gemini for Google Cloud”, which starts at an additional 19 dollars per month [^1]. If that’s really the case, it’s very disappointing to me. I expected access to Gemini CLI to be included in the normal Workspace subscription.

[^1]: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/google/...

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...

workspace accounts always seems like an unsupported mess at google, which is a very strange strategy

Is it really that confusing? Gemini is the equivalent of ChatGPT; AI Studio is for advanced users that want to control e.g. temperature; Vertex AI is the GCP integrated API; Notebook LLM is basically personal RAG; and Jules is a developer agent.

Many of these are not even remotely similar.

[dead]

<3 amazing

I had to ask Gemini CLI to remind myself ;) but you can add this into settings.json:

{ "excludeTools": ["run_shell_command", "write_file"] }

but if you ask Gemini CLI to do this it'll guide you!

I also work on the product. You can extend the tools with MCP. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/t...

I also work on the product :-)

You can also extend with the Extensions feature - https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/e...

Pretty close to what I discovered is essential in https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami, 7 tools will cover majority of the use cases.

It also gets really down on itself, which is pretty funny (and a little scary). Aside from the number of people who've posted online about it wanting to uninstall itself after being filled with shame, I had it get confused on some Node module resolution stuff yesterday and it told me it was deeply sorry for wasting my time and that I didn't deserve to have such a useless assistant.

Out of curiosity, I told it that I was proud of it for trying and it had a burst of energy again and tried a few more (failing) solution, before going back to it's shameful state.

Then I just took care of the issue myself.

Sounds like you can use gemini to create the initial code, then have claude review and finalise what gemini comes up with

Tangental, but I worry that LLMs will cause a great stagnation in programming language evolution, and possibly a bunch of tech.

I've tried using a few new languages and the LLMs would all swap the code for syntactically similar languages, even after telling them to read the doc pages.

Whether that's for better or worse I don't know, but it does feel like new languages are genuinely solving hard problems as their raison d'etre.

>Personally my theory is that Gemini benefits from being able to train on Googles massive internal code base and because Rust has been very low on uptake internally at Google, especially since they have some really nice C++ tooling, Gemini is comparatively bad at Rust.

Were they to train it on their C++ codebase, it would not be effective on account of the fact that they don't use boost or cmake or any major stuff that C++ in the wider world use. It would also suggest that the user make use of all kinds of non-available C++ libraries. So no, they are not training on their own C++ corpus nor would it be particularly useful.

> Personally my theory is that Gemini benefits from being able to train on Googles massive internal code base

But does Google actually train its models on its internal codebase? Considering that there’s always the risk of the models leaking proprietary information and security architecture details, I hardly believe they would run that risk.

That's interesting. I've tried Gemini 2.5 Pro from time to time because of the rave reviews I've seen, on C# + Unity code, and I've always been disappointed (compared to ChatGPT o3 and o4-high-mini and even Grok). This would support that theory.

Interesting, Gemini must be a monster when it comes to Go code then. I gotta try it for that

I definitely think the bigger context window helps. The code quality quite visibly drops across all models I've used as the context fills up, well before the hard limit. The editor tooling also makes a difference—Claude Code pollutes its own context window with miscellaneous file accesses and tool calls as it tries to figure out what to do. Even if it's more manual effort to manage the files that are in-context with Aider, I find the results to be much more consistent when I'm able to micromanage the context.

Approaching the context window limit in Claude Code, having it start to make more and worse mistakes, then seeing it try to compact the context and keep going, is a major "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" situation.

I've found that I can quickly get a new AI session up to speed by adding critical context that it's missing. In my largest codebase it's usually a couple of critical functions.once they have the key context, they can do the rest. This of course doesn't work when you can't view their thinking process and interrupt it to supply them with the context that they are missing. Opacity doesn't work unless the agent does the right thing every time.

Does /compact help with this? I ran out of context with claude code for the first time today, so looking for any tips.

I'm trying to get better at the /resume and memories to try and get more value out of the tool.

I think, there are different niches. AI works extremely well for Web prototyping because a lot of that work is superficial. Back in the 90s we had Delphi where you could make GUI applications with a few clicks as opposed to writing tons of things by hand. The only reason we don't have that for Web is the decentralized nature of it: every framework vendor has their own vision and their own plan for future updates, so a lot of the work is figuring out how to marry the latest version of component X with the specific version of component Y because it is required by component Z. LLMs can do that in a breeze.

But in many other niches (say embedded), the workflow is different. You add a feature, you get weird readings. You start modelling in your head, how the timing would work, doing some combination of tracing and breakpoints to narrow down your hypotheses, then try them out, and figure out what works the best. I can't see the CLI agents do that kind of work. Depends too much on the hunch.

Sort of like autonomous driving: most highway driving is extremely repetitive and easy to automate, so it got automated. But going on a mountain road in heavy rain, while using your judgment to back off when other drivers start doing dangerous stuff, is still purely up to humans.

You might want to give this a try: https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode

Which MCPs allow you to for the heavy lifting with external models in Claude Code?

your data can be used UNLESS you opt out

It's even more nuanced than that.

Google recently testified in court that they still train on user data after users opt out from training [1]. The loophole is that the opt-out only applies to one organization within Google, but other organizations are still free to train on the data. They may or may not have cleaned up their act given that they're under active investigation, but their recent actions haven't exactly earned them the benefit of the doubt on this topic.

[1] https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/googl...

Sorry, that's not correct. Did you check out the link? It doesn't describe the CLI, only the IDE.

"You can find the Gemini Code Assist for individuals privacy notice and settings in two ways:

- VS Code - IntelliJ "

> It's a lot more nuanced than that. If you use the free edition of Code Assist, your data can be used UNLESS you opt out,

Well... you are sending your data to a remote location that is not yours.

Yes, I'm right about to trust Google to do what they pinky swear.

EDIT: Lmao, case in point, two sibling comments pointing out that Google does indeed do this anyway via some loophole; also they can just retain the data and change the policy unilaterally in the future.

If you want privacy do it local with Free software.

In my own experience, 2.5 Pro 03-26 was by far the best LLM model at the time.

The newer models are quantized and distilled (I confirmed this with someone who works on the team), and are a significantly worse experience. I prefer OpenAI O3 and o4-mini models to Gemini 2.5 Pro for general knowledge tasks, and Sonnet 4 for coding.

For coding in my experience Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.0 is hands down better than Gemini 2.5. pro. I just end up fighting with Claude a lot less than I do with Gemini. I had Gemini start a project that involved creating a recursive descent parser for a language in C. It was full of segfaults. I'd ask Gemini to fix them and it would end up breaking something else and then we'd get into a loop. Finally I had Claude Sonnet 4.0 take a look at the code that Gemini had created. It fixed the segfaults in short order and was off adding new features - even anticipating features that I'd be asking for.

If I'm being cynical, it's easy to either say "we use it" or "we don't touch it" but they'd lose everyone that cares about this question if they just said "we use it" - most beneficial position is to keep it as murky as possible.

If I were you I'd assume they're using all of it for everything forever and act accordingly.

Is there any way for a user using the "Login with Google ... for individuals" auth method (I guess auth method 1) -- to opt-out of, and prevent, their input prompts, and output responses, from being used as training data?

From an initial parse of your linked tos-privacy.md doc, it seems like the answer is "no" -- but that seems bonkers to me, so I hope I'm misreading or misunderstanding something!

I think you did a good job CYA on this, but what people were really looking for was a way to opt-out of Google collecting code, similar to the opt-out process for the IDE is available.

I appreciate the effort here, but I’m still confused. Is my $250/mo “ultra” plan considered personal and still something you train on?

Thanks for clarification!

Thanks, one more clarification please. The heading of point #3 seems to mention Google Workspace: "3. Login with Google (for Workspace or Licensed Code Assist users)". But the text content only talks about Code Assist: "For users of Standard or Enterprise edition of Gemini Code Assist" ... Could you clarify whether point #3 applies with login via Google Workspace Business accounts?

This is useful, and directly contradicts the terms and conditions for Gemini CLI (edit: if you use the personal account, then its governed under the Code Assist T&C). I wonder which one is true?

I wonder what the legal difference between "collect" and "log" is.

There's nothing wrong with promoting your own projects, but its a little weird that you don't disclose that you're the creator.

That is just Gemma model. Most people seek capabilities equivalent for Gemini 2.5 Pro if they want to do any kind of coding.

> everyone else has either the same policy or no free usage

That’s not true. ChatGPT, even in the free tier, allows users to opt out of data sharing.

Agree! We're working on it!

I subscribed to Google One through the Google Photos iOS app because I wanted photos I took on my iPhone to be backed up to Google. When I switched to Android and went into Google One to increase my storage capacity in my Google account, I found that it was literally impossible, because the subscription was tied to my iCloud account. I even got on a line with Google Support about it and they told me yeah it's not even possible on their side to disconnect my Google One subscription from Apple. I had to wait for the iCloud subscription to Google One to end, and then I was able to go into Google One and increase my storage capacity.

> The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One

It's not in Basic, Standard or Premium.

It's in a new tier called "Google AI Pro" which I think is worth inclusion in your catalogue of product confusion.

Oh wait, there's even more tiers that for some reason can't be paid for annually. Weird... why not? "Google AI Ultra" and some others just called Premium again but now include AI. 9 tiers, 5 called Premium, 2 with AI in the name but 6 that include Gemini. What a mess.

There is a vscode extension that can basically be an agent but use gemini from the website which is cool.

But I found it to a little bit clunky and I guess I like the ui of google, I mean, the point is to get the point across. If you really hate the gemini ui, I am pretty sure that there is stylus extension which can beautify it or change the styles to your looking.

I guess I am an android user but still I understand your icloud subscription but if you're only choice as to why to not switch to google is passwords (but maybe you can mention more?), then for passwords, please try bitwarden, I found it to be really delightful.

>losing access to other iCloud functionality (like passwords) wasn’t in my plans.

you can export and import the passwords and you can sync your photos to google photos

I had no idea I had a Gemini Pro sub included in One sub all this time. Thanks for the tip :)

Google is really bad at effective advertising.

It is quite interesting how many big corporations eventually grow up to the same mess.

It took me a while but I think the difference between Vertex and Gemini APIs is that Vertex is meant for existing GCP users and Gemini API for everyone else. If you are already using GCP then Vertex API works like everything else there. If you are not, then Gemini API is much easier. But they really should spell it out, currently it's really confusing.

Also they should make it clearer which SDKs, documents, pricing, SLAs etc apply to each. I still get confused when I google up some detail and end up reading the wrong document.

@sachinag is afk but wanted me to flag that he's on point for fixing the Cloud Dashboard - it's WIP!

At least a bunch of people got promotions for demonstrating scope via the release of a top-level AI product.

I just use gemini-pro via openrouter API. No painful clicking around on the cloud to find the billing history.

> Google is fumbling the bag so badly with the pricing.

In certain areas, perhaps, but Google Workspace at $14/month not only gives you Gemini Pro, but 2 TB of storage, full privacy, email with a custom domain, and whatever else. College students get the AI pro plan for free. I recently looked over all the options for folks like me and my family. Google is obviously the right choice, and it's not particularly close.

I wouldn't dream of thinking anyone has anything "locked up". Certainly not OpenAI which increasingly seems to be on an uphill battle against competitors (including Microsoft who even though they're a partner, are also a competitor) who have other inroads.

Not sure what you mean by "full access", as none of the providers offer unrestricted usage. Pro gets you 2.5 Pro with usage limits. Ultra gets you higher limits + deep think (edit: accidentally put research when I meant think where it spends more resources on an answer) + much more Veo 3 usage. And of course you can use the API usage-billed model.

They're 'fumbling' because these models are extremely expensive to run. It's also why there's so many products and so much confusion across the whole industry.

>Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model

It's the second time I read this in this thread. May I ask why you think this is the case? And in which domains? I am very satisfied with 2.5 pro when it comes to philosophical/literary analysis, probably because of the super long context I can fill with whole books, and wanted to try Claude Code for the same purpose, but with folders, summaries, etc to make up for the shorter context length.

Just go on AI Studio?

This is down voted I guess because the circumstances have changed - but boy is it still confusing. All these platforms have chat subscriptions, api pay-as-you-go, CLI subscriptions like "claude code" ... built-in offers via Github enterprise or Google Workspace enterprise ...

It's a frigg'n mess. Everyone at our little startup has spent time trying to understand what the actual offerings are; what the current set of entitlements are for different products; and what API keys might be tied to what entitlements.

I'm with __MatrixMan__ -- it's super confusing and needs some serious improvements in clarity.

I think it is pretty clear that these $20/subs are loss leaders, and really only meant to get regular people to really start leaning on LLMs. Once they are hooked, we will see what the actual price of using so much compute is. I would imagine right now they are pricing their APIs either at cost or slightly below.

AFAIK, Claude code operates on your subscription, no? That's what this support page says

https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...

Could have changed recently. I'm not a user so I can't verify.

This has changed actually, since this month you can use claude code if you have a cloud pro subscription.

Isn't that a bit like saying that gasoline should be sold as a fixed price subscription rather than a usage based scheme where long distance truckers pay more than someone driving < 100 miles per week?

A ChatBot is more like a fixed-price buffet where usage is ultimately human limited (even if the modest eaters are still subsidizing the hogs). An agentic system is going to consume resources in much more variable manner, depending on how it is being used.

> Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them

Obviously these companies want you to increase the amount of their product you consume, but it seems odd to call that a jerk move! FWIW, Anthropic's stated motivation for Claude Code (which Gemini is now copying) was be agnostic to your choice of development tools since CLI access is pretty much ubiquitous, even inside IDEs. Whether it's the CLI-based design, the underlying model, or the specifics of what Claude Code is capable of, they seem to have got something right, and apparently usage internal to Anthropic skyrocketed just based on word of mouth.

This is simply not true. All personal paid packages include Claude Code now.

In addition to others mentioning subscriptions being better in Claude Code, i wanted to compare the two so i tried to find a Claude Max equivalent license... i have no clue how. In their blog post they mention `Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license` but they don't even link to it.. lol.

Some googling lands me to a guide: https://cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/discover/set-up-gemini#...

I stopped there because i don't want to signup i just wanted to review, but i don't have an admin panel or etc.

It feels insane to me that there's a readme on how to give them money. Claude's Max purchase was just as easy as Pro, fwiw.

Maybe their products team is also just run by Gemini, and it's changing its mind every day?

I also just got the email for Gemini ultra and I couldn't even figure out what was being offered compared to pro outside of 30tb storage vs 2tb storage!

> There's also $300/mo AI ULTRA membership

Not if you're in EU though. Even though I have zero or less AI use so far, I tinker with it. I'm more than happy to pay $200+tax for Max 20x. I'd be happy to pay same-ish for Gemini Pro.. if I knew how and where to have Gemini CLI like I do with Claude code. I have Google One. WHERE DO I SIGN UP, HOW DO I PAY AND USE IT GOOGLE? Only thing I have managed so far is through openrouter via API and credits which would amount to thousands a month if I were to use it as such, which I won't do.

What I do now is occasionally I go to AI Studio and use it for free.

I find it very interesting that the only way to reach Google support .... seems to be to file an issue in a competitors product (besides using X or whatever).

They also have a preference for a certain, Google-created UI framework: "React (JavaScript/TypeScript) with Bootstrap CSS, incorporating Material Design principles for UI/UX."

> having a mechanism like npm or pip or whatever to automatically handle that is probably easier

Re-running `cargo install <crate>` will do that. Or install `cargo-update`, then you can bulk update everything.

And it works hella better than using pip in a global python install (you really want pipx/uvx if you're installing python utilities globally).

IIRC you can install Go stuff with `go install`, dunno if you can update via that tho.

You'd think that, but a globally installed npm package is annoying to update, as you have to do it manually and I very rarely need to update other npm global packages so at least personally I always forget to do it.

I feel like Cargo or Go Modules can absolutely do the same thing as the mess of build scripts they have in this repo perfectly well and arguably better.

I don't think that's the main reason. Just installed this and peaked in node_nodules. There are a lot of random deps, probably for the various local capabilities, and it was probably easier to find those libs in the Node ecosystem than elsewhere.

Also, react-reconciler caught my eye. Apparently that's a dependency of ink, which lets you write text-based UIs in React.

That and opentelemetry, whatever the heck that is

Build updating into the tool. e.g.

  uv self update
  yt-dlp --update

If you use Node.js your program is automatically too slow for a CLI, no matter what it actually does.

Unironically, not a bad idea.

Contest between Claude Code and Gemini CLI, who rewrites it faster/cheaper/better?

I have already been asking the Gemini CLI questions about itself.

Let's not pretend this stuff actually works

Fast following is a reasonable strategy. Anthropic provided the existence proof. It’s an immensely useful form factor for AI.

> This isn't about quality products, it's about being able to say you have a CLI tool because the other ai companies have one

Anthropic's Claude Code is also installed using npm/npx.

Eh, I can't see how your comment is relevant ti the parent thread. Creating a CLI in Go is barely more complicated than JS. Rust, probably, but people aren't asking for that.

Writing it in Golang or Rust doesn't really make it better

Node and Rust both did packaging well, I think Golang too. It's a disaster in Python.

You can also do this natively with Node, since v18: https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html#s...

I was going to say the same thing, but they couldn’t resist turning the project into a mess of build scripts that hop around all over the place manually executing node.

A Bun "hello world" is 58Mb

Claude also requires npm, FWIW.

Yeah, this just seems like a pain in the ass that could've been easily avoided.

Why would you want a single-file build anyway, to make it easier to move around on disk? There are reasons for the dep filetree.

Btw, the largest deps in this are React and Open Telemetry.

It shouldn’t be that hard. Logically it should just be, signin and go.

The barrier to use this project is maddening. I went through all of the setup instructions and getting the workspace error for a personal gmail account.

Googlers, we should not have to do all of this setup and prep work for a single account. Enterprise I get, but for a single user? This is insufferable.

not at all. these new models mostly write compiling code.

+1 I have not found Gemini 2.5 better than Claude's latest models -- different and better at some things, but not better in general; and in general I have found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be worse at dealing with large codebases despite its huge context window. So I too am quite curious about the workflow here.

i guess one core idea is to point it to an entrypoint or some part of code you are planning to touch. instead of asking it to load up every file etc. and then figure out the control flow.

That's an interesting comment - I realized I have a gemini api key in my env.

`GEMINI_API_KEY="" gemini` + login using my Google account solves the problem.

What about ... https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/swarm-mode-...

ai power users will drop shit immediately, yes they probably have long term contracts with companies but anyone seriously engaged has switched to claude code now (probably including many devs AT openai/google/etc.)

If you don't think claude code is just miles ahead of other things you haven't been using it (or well)

I am certain they keep metrics on those "power users" (especially since they probably work there) and when everyone drops what they were using and moves to a specific tool that is something they should be careful of.

I've found that Gemini 2.5 Pro is pretty good at analyzing existing code, but really bad at generating a new code. When I use Gemini with Aider, my session usually went like:

    Me: build a plan to build X
    Gemini: I'll do A, B, and C to achieve X
    Me: that sounds really good, please do
    Gemini: <do A, D, E>
    Me: no, please do B and C.
    Gemini: I apologize. <do A', C, F>
    Me: no! A was already correct, please revert. Also do B and C.
    Gemini: <revert the code to A, D, E>

> It would be too wordy, or offer too many comments

Wholeheartedly agree.

Both when chatting in text mode or when asking it to produce code.

The verbosity of the code is the worse. Comments often longer than the actual code, every nook and cranny of an algorithm unrolled over 100's of lines, most of which unnecessary.

Feels like typical code a mediocre Java developer would produce in the early 2000's

yeah we already seen this with gemini 2.5 flash. Gemini 2.0 is such a work horse for API model with great price. Gemini 2.5 flash lite same price but is not as good except math and coding (very niche use case for API key)