Hi - I work on this. Uptake is a steep curve right now, spare a thought for the TPUs today.
Appreciate all the takes so far, the team is reading this thread for feedback. Feel free to pile on with bugs or feature requests we'll all be reading.
Thank you for your work on this. I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to convert an algorithm written in ruby (which I do not know) to vanilla JavaScript. It was a comedy of failing nonsense as I tried to get gpt-4.1 to help, and it just led me down pointless rabbit holes. I installed Gemini CLI out of curiosity, pointed it at the Ruby project, and it did the conversion from a single request, total time from "think I'll try this" to it working was 5 minutes. Impressed.
There is one feature in Claude Code which is often overlooked and I haven't seen it in any of the other agentic tools: There is a tool called "sub-agent", which creates a fresh context windows in which the model can independently work on a clearly defined sub-task. This effectively turns Claude Code from a single-agent model to a hierarchical multi-agent model (I am not sure if the hierarchy goes to depths >2).
I wonder if it is a concious decision not to include this (I imagine it opens a lot of possibilities of going crazy, but it also seems to be the source of a great amount of Claud Code's power). I would very much like to play with this if it appears in gemini-cli
Next step would be the possibility to define custom prompts, toolsets and contexts for specific re-occuring tasks, and these appearing as tools to the main agent. Example for such a thing: create_new_page. The prompt could describe the steps one needs to create the page. Then the main agent could simply delegate this as a well-defined task, without cluttering its own context with the operational details.
Thanks for building this! The tool shows a lot of promise. Coming from Claude Code, the core functionality feels solid - just needs some permission refinements to match enterprise use cases. This is based upon quickly skimming the current code.
High ROI feature requests:
• Pattern-based permissions - Bash(git:) to allow git but not rm, Write(logs/.txt) for path scoping
• CLI permission flags - --allowedTools "Read,Bash(npm test)" --deniedTools "Write" for session overrides
• Allow/deny precedence rules - explicit deny should override general allow (security principle)
• Config file hierarchy - system → user → project precedence for policy enforcement
Medium ROI improvements:
• Command argument filtering - whitelist git commit but not git --exec-path=/bin/sh
• Multiple config formats - support both simple arrays and structured permission objects
• Runtime permission diagnostics - gemini permissions list to debug what's actually enabled
• Environment variable injection - top-level env config for OTEL endpoints, API keys, etc.
The permission engine is really the key piece - once you can express "allow X but not Y within X", it unlocks most advanced use cases. Keep up the great work!
One thing I'd really like to see in coding agents is this: As an architect, I want to formally define module boundaries in my software, in order to have AI agents adhere to and profit from my modular architecture.
Even with 1M context, for large projects, it makes sense to define boundaries These will typically be present in some form, but they are not available precisely to the coding agent. Imagine there was a simple YAML format where I could specify modules and where they can be found in the source tree, and the APIs of other modules it interacts with. Then it would be trivial to turn this into a context that would very often fit into 1M tokens. When an agent decides something needs to be done in the context of a specific module, it could then create a new context window containing exactly that module, effetively turning a large codebase into a small codebase, for which Gemini is extraordinarily effective.
So, as a member of an organization who pays for google workspace with gemini, I get the message `GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT environment variable not found. Add that to your .env and try again, no reload needed!`
At the very least, we need better documentation on how to get that environment variable, as we are not on GCP and this is not immediately obvious how to do so. At the worst, it means that your users paying for gemini don't have access to this where your general google users do.
Google Gemini Google Gemini Ultra AI Studio Vertex AI Notebook LLM Jules
All different products doing the sameish thing. I don’t know where to send users to do anything. They are all licensed differently. Bonkers town.
Hi - I integrated Apple Container on M1 to run[1] the code generated by Gemini CLI. It works great!
1. CodeRunner - https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner/tree/main?tab=readm...
Requests for documentation clarification:
- Here [1] it says "Project settings override user settings." How does gemini determine if we're in a project? Does it look for a `.gemini` folder in the current working directory as well as every parent directory up to the root? Would Gemini be able to read the contents of a subfolder of the CWD if the subfolder contains a different `.gemini` folder?
- I don't see documentation for the `selectedAuthType` field in the documentation for settings.json. Mine says `oauth-personal`. I could've sworn I signed in with my Google Workspace account. Does `oauth-personal` apply to Workspace accounts?
And a feature request: it would be nice to add a restriction in the settings.json file forcing anybody who uses gemini in that project to sign in to a Workspace account in a specific org (or use a specific project, I guess).
[1]: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...
Hi, Thanks for this work.
currently it seems these are the CLI tools available. Is it possible to extend or actually disable some of these tools (for various reasons)?
> Available Gemini CLI tools:
- ReadFolder - ReadFile - SearchText - FindFiles - Edit - WriteFile - WebFetch - ReadManyFiles - Shell - Save Memory - GoogleSearchThanks so much for this! I’d really appreciate a more consumer oriented subscription offering, similar to Claude Max, that combines Gemini CLI (with IP compliance) and the Gemini app (extra points for API access too!).
Right now authentication doesn't work if you're working on a remote machine and try to authenticate with Google, FYI. You need an alternate auth flow that gives the user a link and lets them paste a key in (this is how Claude Code does it).
Using the Gemini CLI the first thing I tried to do was "Create GEMINI.md files to customize your interactions with Gemini." The command ran for about a minute before receiving a too many requests error.
> You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details. For more information on this error, head to: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits.
Discouraging
Feature request! :)
I'm a Gemini Pro subscriber and I would love to be able to use my web-based chat resource limits with, or in addition to, what is offered here. I have plenty of scripts that are essentially "Weave together a complex prompt I can send to Gemini Flash to instantly get the answer I'm looking for and xclip it to my clipboard", and this would finally let me close the last step in that scripts.
Love what I'm seeing so far!
The thing that had me close it and go back to Claude Code immediately was how often Gemini CLI failed to make file changes. This doesn’t instill confidence at all, with it retrying edits multiple times - who knows what it ends up editing, then.
CC has this issue too, but way less often, and second shot almost always works.
Could Gemini CLI be used for PR reviews? For example, would you expect that asking Gemini to compare two git commit hashes and analyze the code changes for potential bugs/conciseness/adhesion to the idiomatic project style, etc. to work well?
Edit: I tried it. The setup was a breeze. I fed the CLI two git commit IDs and some light prompting on what to look for. It gave a reasonable response. I'll try on a real PR shortly.
- [deleted]
I have been evaluating other tools like Amp (from Sourcegraph) and when trying Gemini Cli on VsCode I found some things to improve:
- On a new chat I have to re-approve things like executing "go mod tidy", "git", write files... I need to create a new chat for each feature, (maybe an option to clear the current chat on VsCode would work)
- I have found some problems with adding some new endpoint on an example Go REST server I was trying it on, it just deleted existing endpoints on the file. Same with tests, it deleted existing tests when asking to add a test. For comparison I didn't find these problems when evaluating Amp (uses Claude 4)
Overall it works well and hope you continue with polishing it, good job!!
Pointed it at a project directory and asked it to find and fix an intentionally placed bug without referencing any filenames. It seemed to struggle finding any file or constructing a context about the project unless specifically asked. FWIW, Claude Code tries to build an 'understanding' of the codebase when given the same prompt. For example, it struggled when I asked to "fix the modal logic" but nothing was specifically called a modal.
Is the recommendation to specifically ask "analyze the codebase" here?
I'm just a hobbyist, but I keep getting the error "The code change produced by Gemini cannot be automatically applied. You can manually apply the change or ask Gemini to try again". I assume this is because the service is being slammed?
Edit: I should mention that I'm accessing this through Gemini Code Assist, so this may be something out of your wheelhouse.
Hello, thanks for the work for finally having an analog to Claude Code.
A natural question to ask is, if in the near future, can Google One "Google AI Pro" subscribers have higher limits than what is offered for free users?
i have a Google AI Pro subscription - what kind of credits/usage/allowance do i get towards gemini cli ?
Hi. It is unclear from the README whether the free limits apply also when there's an API key found in the environment - not explicitly set for this tool - and there is no login requirement.
Is LiteLLM integration on the roadmap? I get that part of the motivation to build this is to funnel usage to Google models, but it would be nice to be able to go through OpenRouter and/or use local models too. Open source is nice, but open model configuration would be nicer :)
Is there a reason all workspace accounts need a project ID? We pay for gemini pro for our workspace accounts but we don't use GCP or have a project ID otherwise.
Please, for the love of God, stop your models always answering with essays or littering code with tutorial style comments. Almost every task devolves into "now get rid of the comments". It seems impossible to prevent this.
And thinking is stupid. "Show me how to generate a random number in python"... 15s later you get an answer.
How often did you use gemini-cli to build on gemini-cli?
Is there a way to instantly, quickly prompt it in the terminal, without loading the full UI? Just to get a short response without filling the terminal page.
like to just get a short response - for simple things like "what's a nm and grep command to find this symbol in these 3 folders". I use gemini alot for this type of thing already
Or would that have to be a custom prompt I write?
Does it have LSP (language server) support? How should I think of this as different from Aider?
it would be cool to work with my google ai pro sub
Hi cperry - do you have an idea of when Gemini 2.5 live API will make GA? I saw a new GA label was created last week.
Congrats on your success. May you all be promoted and may your microkitchens be stocked.
Why does this CLI don't support google's A2A?
- [deleted]
Thank you for supporting Windows natively.
one piece of feedback. Please do neovim on top of vim or have a way to customize the editor beyond your list.
F for the TPUs.
Overall it looks and feels good. I gave it a problem, like, what was it... to update website pages to use single layout, it wasn't trivial but it wasn't that hard. It burned through 7M tokens and like 20-25mins didn't accomplished it. I stopped it because I didn't want to waste more resources.
I think with better prompting on my end, as I have good experience with Gemini, this will be awesome. You probably could tweak a lot on your end as well, don't let it get stuck in cycles.
[flagged]
Hey the interface on YouTube loads super slowly for me. The change appeared a few months ago. I'm not talking about the video streams, but the ajax loading of the UI. Whether it's opening a new youtube tab or navigating between videos within youtube, it takes forever. Chrome/Safari -> same deal, 30 seconds delays is what I observe. My macbook pro is 10 years old, the problem doesn't appear on more recent hardware, but still youtube shouldn't be the slowest website to load on my machine. I can load spotify.com just fine in about 5 seconds.
Been using Claude Code (4 Opus) fairly successfully in a large Rust codebase, but sometimes frustrated by it with complex tasks. Tried Gemini CLI today (easy to get working, which was nice) and it was pretty much a failure. It did a notably worse job than Claude at having the Rust code modifications compile successfully.
However, Gemini at one point output what will probably be the highlight of my day:
"I have made a complete mess of the code. I will now revert all changes I have made to the codebase and start over."
What great self-awareness and willingness to scrap the work! :)
Gemini has some fun failure modes. It gets "frustrated" when changes it makes doesn't work, and replies with oddly human phrases like "Well, that was unexpected" and then happily declares that (I see the issue!) "the final tests will pass" when it's going down a blind alley. It's extremely overconfident by default and much more exclamatory without changing the system prompt. Maybe in training it was taught/figured out that manifesting produces better results?
This was also my exact experience. I was pretty excited because I usually use Gemini Pro 2.5 when Claude Code gets stuck by pasting the whole code and asking questions and it was able to get me out of a few pickles a couple of times.
Unfortunately the CLI version wasn't able to create coherent code or fix some issues I had in my Rust codebase as well.
Here's hope that it eventually becomes great.
I asked it to do a comparatively pedestrian task: write a script to show top 5 google searches.
First it did the search itself and then added "echo" for each of them - cute
Then it tried to use pytrends which didn't go anywhere
Then it tried some other paid service which also didn't go anywhere
Then it tried some other stuff which also didn't go anywhere
Finally it gave up and declared failure.
It will probably be useful as it can do the modify/run loop itself with all the power of Gemini but so far, underwhelming.
Claude will do the same start over if things get too bad. At least I've seen it when its edits went haywire and trashed everything.
Same here. Tried to implement a new feature on one of our apps to test it. It completely screwed things up. Used undefined functions and stuff. After a couple of iterations of error reporting and fixing I gave up.
Claude did it fine but I was not happy with the code. What Gemini came up with was much better but it could not tie things together at the end.
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.
So far I've found Gemini CLI is very good at explaining what existing code does.
I can't say much about writing new code though.
I tried it too, it was so bad. I got the same "revert" behaviour after only 15 minutes.
A few days ago I tested Claude Code by completely vibe coding a simple stock tracker web app in streamlit python. It worked incredibly well, until it didn't. Seems like there is a critical project size where it just can't fix bugs anymore. Just tried this with Gemini CLI and the critical project size it works well for seems to be quite a bit bigger. Where claude code started to get lost, I simply told Gemini CLI to "Analyze the codebase and fix all bugs". And after telling it to fix a few more bugs, the application simply works.
We really are living in the future
I wonder how much of this had to do with the context window size? Gemini’s window is 5x larger than Cladue’s.
I’ve been using Claude for a side project for the past few weeks and I find that we really get into a groove planning or debugging something and then by the time we are ready to implement, we’ve run out of context window space. Despite my best efforts to write good /compact instructions, when it’s ready to roll again some of the nuance is lost and the implementation suffers.
I’m looking forward to testing if that’s solved by the larger Gemini context window.
Current best practice for Claude Code is to have heavy lifting done by Gemini Pro 2.5 or o3/o3pro. There are ways to do this pretty seamlessly now because of MCP support (see Repo Prompt as an example.) Sometimes you can also just use Claude but it requires iterations of planning, integration while logging everything, then repeat.
I haven't looked at this Gemini CLI thing yet, but if its open source it seems like any model can be plugged in here?
I can see a pathway where LLMs are commodities. Every big tech company right now both wants their LLM to be the winner and the others to die, but they also really, really would prefer a commodity world to one where a competitor is the winner.
If the future use looks more like CLI agents, I'm not sure how some fancy UI wrapper is going to result in a winner take all. OpenAI is winning right now with user count by pure brand name with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT clearly is an inferior UI for real work.
IIRC Claude Code indexes your code via a vector DB. That's why it's good for larger codebases. I'm not aware that GeminiCLI has this, too.
Ask the AI to document each module in a 100-line markdown. These should be very high level, don't contain any detail, but just include pointers to relevant files for AI to find out by itself. With a doc as the starting point, AI will have context to work on any module.
If the module just can't be documented in this way in under 100 lines, it's a good time to refactor. Chances are if Claude's context window is not enough to work with a particular module, a human dev can't either. It's all about pointing your LLM precisely at the context that matters.
I feel like you get more mileage out of prompt engineering and being specific... not sure if "fix all the bugs" is an effective real-world use case.
Yeah but this collapses under any real complexity and there is likely an extreme amount of redundant code and would probably be twice as memory efficient if you just wrote it yourself.
Im actually interested to see if we see a rise in demand for DRAM that is greater than usual because more software is vibe coded than being not, or some form of vibe coding.
Yeah, and it's variable, can happen at 250k, 500k or later. When you interrogate it; usually the issue comes to it being laser focused or stuck on one specific issue, and it's very hard to turn it around. For the lack of the better comparison it feels like the AI is on a spectrum...
Claude seems to have trouble with extracting code snippets to add to the context as the session gets longer and longer. I've seen it get stuck in a loop simply trying to use sed/rg/etc to get just a few lines out of a file and eventually give up.
At some point, LLMs just get distracted and you might be better off throwing it away and restarting hah.
If you use this, all of your code data will be sent to Google. From their terms:
https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p...
When you use Gemini Code Assist for individuals, Google collects your prompts, related code, generated output, code edits, related feature usage information, and your feedback to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies.
To help with quality and improve our products (such as generative machine-learning models), human reviewers may read, annotate, and process the data collected above. We take steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting the data from your Google Account before reviewers see or annotate it, and storing those disconnected copies for up to 18 months. Please don't submit confidential information or any data you wouldn't want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.
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, which is at the bottom of the support article you link to:
"If you don't want this data used to improve Google's machine learning models, you can opt out by following the steps in Set up Gemini Code Assist for individuals."
and then the link: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/set-up...
If you pay for code assist, no data is used to improve. If you use a Gemini API key on a pay as you go account instead, it doesn't get used to improve. It's just if you're using a non-paid, consumer account and you didn't opt out.
That seems different than what you described.
Hey all, This is a really great discussion, and you've raised some important points. We realize the privacy policies for the Gemini CLI were confusing depending on how you log in, and we appreciate you calling that out.
To clear everything up, we've put together a single doc that breaks down the Terms of Service and data policies for each account type, including an FAQ that covers the questions from this thread.
Here’s the link: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/t...
Thanks again for pushing for clarity on this!
To be honest this is by far the most frustrating part of the Gemini ecosystem, to me. I think 2.5 pro is probably the best model out there right now, and I'd love to use it for real work, but their privacy policies are so fucking confusing and disjointed that I just assume there is no privacy whatsoever. And that's with the expensive Pro Plus Ultra MegaMax Extreme Gold plan I'm on.
I hope this is something they're working on making clearer.
There is some information on this buried in configuration.md under "Usage Statistics". They claim:
*What we DON'T collect:*
- *Personally Identifiable Information (PII):* We do not collect any personal information, such as your name, email address, or API keys.
- *Prompt and Response Content:* We do not log the content of your prompts or the responses from the Gemini model.
- *File Content:* We do not log the content of any files that are read or written by the CLI.
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/0915bf7d677...
Mozilla and Google provide an alternative called gemmafile which gives you an airgapped version of Gemini (which Google calls Gemma) that runs locally in a single file without any dependencies. https://huggingface.co/jartine/gemma-2-27b-it-llamafile It's been deployed into production by 32% of organizations: https://www.wiz.io/reports/the-state-of-ai-in-the-cloud-2025
This is just for free use (individuals), for standard and enterprise they don't use the data.
Which pretty much means if you are using it for free, they are using your data.
I don't see what is alarming about this, everyone else has either the same policy or no free usage. Hell the surprising this is that they still let free users opt-out...
They really need to provide some clarity on the terms around data retention and training, for users who access Gemini CLI free via sign-in to a personal Google account. It's not clear whether the Gemini Code Assist terms are relevant, or indeed which of the three sets of terms they link at the bottom of the README.md apply here.
Kinda a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone wants to use these tools that must be trained on more and more code to get better, but nobody wants it to be trained on their code. Bit silly imo.
Do you honestly believe that the opt-out by Anthropic and Cursor means your code won't be used for training their models? Seems likely that they would rather just risk taking a massive fine for potentially solving software development than to let some competitor try it instead.
Insane to me there isn’t even an asterisk in the blog post about this. The data collection is so over the top I don’t think users suspect it because it’s just absurd. For instance Gemini Pro chats are trained on too.
If this is legal, it shouldn’t be.
Is this significantly different than what we agree to when we put code on GitHub?
Some of my code is so bad I'm sure it will damage their models!
How does that compare to Claude Code? How protected are you when using CC?
>If you use this, all of your code data will be sent to Google.
Not if you pay for it.
seems to be straight "yes" with no opt-out. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/t...
I love how fragmented Google's Gemini offerings are. I'm a Pro subscriber, but I now learn I should be a "Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise" user to get additional usage. I didn't even know that existed! As a run of the mill Google user I get a generous usage tier but paying them specifically for "Gemini" doesn't get me anything when it comes to "Gemini CLI". Delightful!
Here's the system prompt, rendered as a Gist: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9e5f13665b3112cea00035df7da69...
More of my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/25/gemini-cli/
Ugh, I really wish this had been written in Go or Rust. Just something that produces a single binary executable and doesn't require you to install a runtime like Node.
"Failed to login. Ensure your Google account is not a Workspace account."
Is your vision with Gemini CLI to be geared only towards non-commercial users? I have had a workspace account since GSuite and have been constantly punished for it by Google offerings all I wanted was gmail with a custom domain and I've lost all my youtube data, all my fitbit data, I cant select different versions of some of your subscriptions (seemingly completely random across your services from a end-user perspective), and now as a Workspace account I cant use Gemini CLI for my work, which is software development. This approach strikes me as actively hostile towards your loyal paying users...
I literally wrote "hello" and got this:
> hello
[API Error: {"error":{"message":"{\n \"error\": {\n \"code\": 429,\n \"message\": \"Resource has been exhausted (e.g. check quota).\",\n \"status\": \"RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED\"\n }\n}\n","code":429,"status":"Too Many Requests"}}] Please wait and try again later. To increase your limits, request a quota increase through AI Studio, or switch to another /auth method
⠼ Polishing the pixels... (esc to cancel, 84s)
I have been using this for about a month and it’s a beast, mostly thanks to 2.5pro being SOTA and also how it leverages that huge 1M context window. Other tools either preemptively compress context or try to read files partially.
I have thrown very large codebases at this and it has been able to navigate and learn them effortlessly.
-y, --yolo Automatically accept all actions (aka YOLO mode, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0 for more details)? [boolean] [default: false]
Gemini is by far the most confusing product of all time. The paid version for it is available in 3 forms: 1. Gemini pro (which gets you more google drive storage and some form of access to veo so people obviously get that) 2. Google AI studio, just to piss off redmond devs and which is used by no one outside google 3. This CLI, which has its own plan.
Then there are 3rd party channels, if you have a recent samsung phone, you get 1 yr access to AI features powered by gemini, after which you need to pay. And lord knows where else has google been integrating gemini now.
Ive stopped using google's AI now. Its like they have dozens of teams within gemini on completely different slack sessions.
> That’s why we’re introducing Gemini CLI
Definitely not because of Claude Code eating our lunch!
Key highlights from blog post and GitHub repo:
- Open-source (Apache 2.0, same as OpenAI Codex)
- 1M token context window
- Free tier: 60 requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day (requires Google account authentication)
- Higher limits via Gemini API or Vertex AI
- Google Search grounding support
- Plugin and script support (MCP servers)
- Gemini.md file for memory instruction
- VS Code integration (Gemini Code Assist)
Can't we standardize on AGENTS.md instead of all these specific CLAUDE.md and now GEMINI.md.
I just symlink now to AGENTS.md
I've a few concerns:
1) I tried to use it on an existing project asking this "Analyse the project and create a GEMINI.md". It fumbled some non sense for 10-15 minutes and after that it said it was done, but it had only analysed a few files in the root and didn't generate anything at all.
2) Despite finding a way to login with my workspace account, it then asks me for the GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT which doesn't make any sense to me
3) It's not clear AT ALL if and how my data and code will be used to train the models. Until this is pretty clear, for me is a no go.
p.s: it feels like a promising project which has been rushed out too quickly :/
I couldn't even log in, which is why I really disliked this tool. The only thing I was able to do was change the color theme.
When I try to log in using a personal account, it tells me I need to generate something in the dashboard. I know that on my main account from maybe 15 years ago I had things like domains thats nowdays Google Workspace. But I'm trying to log in and authorize using my second (NOT MAIN), relatively new account. Despite this, it redirects me to the console (like it would for the first account), and there it says I'm logged in (!), but the application itself says I'm not.
I switched profiles within the console too, tried the same steps, and it still results in the same problem. Yes, I can see my new profile in the top right corner, not the old one. It sends me to a "Users may have to specify a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT if:" github [0] saying this ID is needed, and I honestly would even generate it, but I don't want to waste time with the program if you can't even get basic authorization working correctly.
0: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...
> To use Gemini CLI free-of-charge, simply login with a personal Google account to get a free Gemini Code Assist license. That free license gets you access to Gemini 2.5 Pro and its massive 1 million token context window. To ensure you rarely, if ever, hit a limit during this preview, we offer the industry’s largest allowance: 60 model requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day at no charge.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. What’s the catch? How/why is this free?
I added a two way voice interface to Gemini CLI.
https://youtu.be/HC6BGxjCVnM?feature=shared&t=36
It's a FOSS MCP server I created a couple of weeks ago:
- https://github.com/mbailey/voicemode
# Installation (~/.gemini/settings.json)
{
"theme": "Dracula", "selectedAuthType": "oauth-personal", "mcpServers": { "voice-mode": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "voice-mode" ] } } }I’ve found the experience pretty underwhelming so far. Maybe they’re under heavy load right now, but nearly every time I try to use it, it takes about 20 seconds before it automatically switches from 2.5 Pro to 2.5 Flash due to delays. Unfortunately, the Flash output just isn’t good enough.
Link of announcement blog post: https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...
I've found a method that gives me a lot more clarity about a company's privacy policy:
These companies do understand what privacy people want and how to write that in plain language, and they do that when they actually offer it (to their enterprise clients). You can diff this against what they say to their consumers to see where they are trying to find wiggle room ("finetuning" is not "training", "ever got free credits" means not-"is a paid account", etc)1. Go to their enterprise site 2. See what privacy guarantees they advertise above the consumer product 3. Conclusion: those are things that you do not get in the consumer productFor Code Assist, here's their enterprise-oriented page vs their consumer-oriented page:
https://cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/codeassist/security-pri...
https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p...
It seems like these are both incomplete and one would need to read their overall pages, which would be something more like
https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#revi...
I used this a fair amount today. My first impressions are that it feels a bit worse to use than Claude Code (understandable given a day 1 product), and the lying progress indicator is extremely annoying.
It generates a bunch of fake activity indicators based on your prompt, then cycles through them on a timer. It has no bearing on the actual activity going on underneath.
It appears to be much slower than Claude Code, possibly due to being overloaded, but it feels like it thinks a lot more before beginning to suggest file edits. The permissions aren't as nice either. Where Claude Code suggests "allow uv run pytest without approval", Gemini suggests "allow uv run without approval", which is broader than I would like.
So far I'm getting mixed results. I noted in its memory and in GEMINI.md a couple of directives like "only generate migration files using cli tools to ensure the timestamps are correct" and "never try to run migrations yourself" and it failed to follow those instructions a couple of times within ~20 minutes of testing.
In comparison to Claude Code Opus 4, it seemed much more eager to go on a wild goose chase of fixing a problem by creating calls to new RPCs that then attempted to modify columns that didn't exist or which had a different type, and its solution to this being a problem was to then propose migration after migration to modify the db schema to fit the shape of the rpc it had defined.
Reminded me of the bad old days of agentic coding circa late 2024.
I'm usually a big fan of 2.5 Pro in an analysis / planning context. It seems to just weirdly fall over when it comes to tool calling or something?
Tried it out.
1. First authentication didn't work on my headless system, because it wants an oauth redirect to localhost - sigh.
2. Next, WebFetch isn't able to navigate github, so I had to manually dig out some references for it.
3. About 2 mins in, I just got ``` ℹ Rate limiting detected. Automatically switching from gemini-2.5-pro to gemini-2.5-flash for faster responses for the remainder of this session. ``` in a loop with no more progress.
I understand the tool is new, so not drawing too many conclusions from this yet, but it does seem like it was rushed out a bit.
Review after 1 hour in:
Gemini CLI does not take new direction especially well. After planning, I asked it to execute and it just kept talking about the plan.
Another time when I hit escape and asked it to stop and undo the last change, it just plowed ahead.
It makes a lot of mistakes reading and writing to files.
Some, but by no means all, of the obsequious quotes from my first hour with the product: - “You’ve asked a series of excellent questions that have taken us on a deep dive ...” - “The proposed solution is not just about clarity; it’s also the most efficient and robust.”
Given that there's another comment complaining about this being in node...
This perfectly demonstrates the benefit of the nodejs platform. Trivial to install and use. Almost no dependency issues (just "> some years old version of nodejs"). Immediately works effortlessly.
I've never developed anything on node, but I have it installed because so many hugely valuable tools use it. It has always been absolutely effortless and just all benefit.
And what a shift from most Google projects that are usually a mammoth mountain of fragile dependencies.
(uv kind of brings this to python via uvx)
I just get downgraded to 2.5 Flash after like three prompts and can't seem to find an option to switch back. So much for "60 requests per minute are free".
We need laws that these megacorps have to show in an easy and understandable form which data is collected and what happens to the data. If they do fail to explain this (in 5 sentences or less) - they should pay insane fines per day. It is the only way (and solves the debt crisis of the US at the same time). It is ridiculous that we do have this situation in 2025 that we do not know which data is processed or not.
This is all very cool, but I hate to be the "look at the shiny lights" guy...
How did they do that pretty "GEMINI" gradient in the terminal? is that a thing we can do nowadays? It doesn't seem to be some blocky gradient where each character is a different color. It's a true gradient.
(yes I'm aware this is likely a total clone of claude code, but still am curious about the gradient)
Well, I've tried it, and I'm not impressed. Gemini used to be pretty good, and I like the context size, but my attempts to use the Gemini client resulted in:
1. The thing going in a circle trying to fix a bug by persistently trying different permutations of an API interface it never bothered to check the definition of. Isn't that why it's internet connected?
2. When I asked it to just analyze instead of change stuff. It just hung for 20 minutes giving me responses saying that gemini-2.5-pro was slow, and that it was switching to 2.5-flash, with no other output to indicate what it was doing other than those cute scrolling messages that mean nothing.
At least in Claude it's clear that the messages mean nothing, because they're clearly generic. Gemini gives you the impression the status messages mean something since they're sort of related to the topic being worked on.
The API can be used both via your normal Google account, or via API key?
Because it says in the README:
> Authenticate: When prompted, sign in with your personal Google account. This will grant you up to 60 model requests per minute and 1,000 model requests per day using Gemini 2.5 Pro.
> For advanced use or increased limits: If you need to use a specific model or require a higher request capacity, you can use an API key: ...
When I have the Google AI Pro subscription in my Google account, and I use the personal Google account for authentication here, will I also have more requests per day then?
I'm currently wondering what makes more sense for me (not for CLI in particular, but for Gemini in general): To use the Google AI Pro subscription, or to use an API key. But I would also want to use the API maybe at some point. I thought the API requires an API key, but here it seems also the normal Google account can be used?
If you're looking for a fully open source, LLM-agnostic alternative to Claude Code and Gemini CLI, check out OpenHands: https://docs.all-hands.dev/usage/how-to/cli-mode
Hope this will pressure Anthropic into releasing Claude Code as open source.
Like OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, this one is also built with Ink, React for the terminal.
The killer feature of Claude Code is that you can just pay for Max and not worry about API billing. It lets me use it pretty much all the time without stressing over every penny or checking the billing page. Until they do that - I'm sticking with Claude.
I wish google would treat its products as completely separate offerings, each with its own login, dedicated site, and user management. I don’t want to be automatically logged into all Google services just because I signed in to one. Their ecosystem is becoming as complex and confusing as Microsoft’s. They should focus on making each product standalone, instead of forcing synergies that only make the user experience worse.
Loving this for working with gcloud
gave it brief instructions to deploy a hobby static site on cloud run yesterday; with additional architecture to set up (load balancer etc). It got into a loop, started deleting the gcloud resouces it created when it hit a 403 error for the site.
I hit ESC and prodded a little in terms of authentication rules ... and off it went to complete the task. bravo!
I gave it a shot just now with a fairly simple refactor. +19 lines, -9 lines, across two files. Totally ballsed it up. Defined one of the two variables it was meant to, referred to the non-implemented one. I told it "hey you forgot the second variable" and then it went and added it in twice. Added comments (after prompting it to) which were half-baked, ambiguous when read in context.
Never had anything like this with claude code.
I've used Gemini 2.5 Pro quite a lot and like most people I find it's very intelligent. I've bent over backwards to use Gemini 2.5 Pro in another piece of work because it's so good. I can only assume it's the gemini CLI itself that's using the model poorly. Keen to try again in a month or two and see if this poor first impression is just a teething issue.
I told it that it did a pretty poor job and asked it why it thinks that is, told it that I know it's pretty smart. It gave me a wall of text and I asked for the short summary
> My tools operate on raw text, not the code's structure, making my edits brittle and prone to error if the text patterns aren't perfect. I lack a persistent, holistic view of the code like an IDE provides, so I can lose track of changes during multi-step tasks. This led me to make simple mistakes like forgetting a calculation and duplicating code.
Anyone else think it's interesting all these CLIs are written in TypeScript? I'd expect Google to use Go.
I couldn't find any mentions of whether they train their models on your source code. May be someone was able to?
I already use goose[1]. It lets me connect through OpenRouter. Then I can use Gemini without having to give Google Cloud my credit card. Also, OpenRouter makes it easier to switch between models, deals with Claude's silly rate limiting messages gracefully, and I only have to pay in one place.
These always contain easter eggs. I got some swag from Claude Code, and as suspected, Gemini CLI includes `/corgi` to activate corgi mode.
Tangentially related, I published some notes about "docs for agents" (e.g. `GEMINI.md`, `CLAUDE.md`, `AGENTS.md`, etc.) yesterday
It's more focused on implications for docs strategy (I'm worried that agent providers are steering us towards duplicating information that's already in eng docs) rather than user best practices i.e. "put this into your agent doc to improve agent performance"
Wanted to give it a proper try but because it's so overloaded, it almost instantly downgraded me to 2.5-flash. The vscode extension didn't even load, it just gave me a rate limit warning directly after logging in
Tried upgrading to the Standard plan through Google Cloud with the hope that it would allow me to do more, but after switching my account to the now-paid account, it still almost instantly downgraded me to 2.5-flash
For the times when I was able to use 2.5-pro, the output has been very good. But the moment it switches to flash, the quality goes down by about 80% and I would never let it code on anything
It's really cool! I've tried it https://youtu.be/Gm8XjcNQ1Vk :)
Oh hey, afaik all of this LLM traffic goes through my service!
Set up not too long ago, and afaik pretty load-bearing for this. Feels great, just don’t ask me any product-level questions. I’m not part of the Gemini CLI team, so I’ll try to keep my mouth shut.
Not going to lie, I’m pretty anxious this will fall over as traffic keeps climbing up and up.
It doesn't work. It just gives me 429 after a minute.
Oh man I tried dual wielding with cursor, setting up a communication so they both can work at the same time on the same thing, got banned from cursor Then tried with windsurf, ran a bad shellscript without reading it, used up the limit instantly, kill the script, oh man somehow it's still not working either I used the daily limit in an impossible way despite the minute limit supposedly existing, or the way it communicated sidestepped it into a limbo where it is just permanently confused and thinks for 300s then cancels a "test" prompt in the cli
Gemini CLI wanted to run `git log` and I accidentally hit "Yes, you can call git without confirmation" and I just realized the AI may decide to git push or something like that on it's own.
How do I reset permissions so it always asks again for `git` invocations?
Thanks!
What's up with printing lame jokes every few seconds? The last thing I want from a tool like this is my eye to be drawn to the window all the time as if something had changed and needs my action. (Having a spinner is fine, having changing variable length text isn't.)
I tried it with container-use and its pretty nice! (while the APIs cooperated). One thing that stood out to me compared to other agent products was how intuitive the interface was to use. `/help` is something that not everybody has and its wild. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmh30wuXg08
Why would someone use this over aider?
For me it won't be a real command-line tool until I run into a problem and I get my very own open-source champion on support forums undermining my self-confidence & motivation by asking me "Why would I want to do that?"
Thanks, Google. A bit of feedback - integration with `gcloud` CLI auth would have been appreciated.
Appreciate how easy it is to report a bug! I like these commands.
A bit gutted by the `make sure it is not a workspace account`. What's wrong with Google prioritising free accounts vs paid accounts? This is not the first time they have done it when announcing Gemini, too.
Gemini CLI pricing:
1. Gemini Code Assist (GCA) for Individuals: FREE for 1,000 model requests/day
2. GCA Standard: $22.80/month for 1,500 model requests/day (1.5x more than FREE)
3. GCA Enterprise: $54.00/month for 2,000 model requests/day (2X more than FREE)
Source: https://codeassist.google
Compare the user experience of exploring the suite of AI products from each company (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, etc).
It is vastly more difficult to understand what Google is offering compared to the others, to what cost, getting an API-key or similar, understanding usage/billing across the suite, etc.
I wouldn't expect any regular person to bother signing up for any of Google's products, let alone understand what they're really offering.
Gemini web UI is extremely apologetic and self deprecating at times. Therefore I was not surprised to experience Gemini spiraling into an infinite loop of self-deprecation - literally it abandoned the first command and spiraled into 5-10line blocks of "i suck"
---
Right now there is one CLI that influences and stands far and beyond all others. Smooth UX, and more critical some "natural" or inherent ability to use its tools well.
Gemini can also achieve this - but i think it's clear the leader is ahead because they have a highly integrated training process with the base model and agentic tool use.
I got it to look at the java source code of my old LibGdx 2d puzzle game, and it was able to explain what the game would be like to play and what the objectives were and how the puzzle elements worked. Impressed.
It worked yesterday, but stopped today with "Failed to login. Ensure your Google account is not a Workspace account. Message: Resource has been exhausted (e.g. check quota). "
I guess I will use something else. This is all very annoying given that I actually pay for Gemini Pro...
It's great to see Google expanding Gemini into a CLI tool, but I do have concerns about data usage. While it’s free for certain requests, the fact that both prompts and outputs can be used to train the model raises privacy and usage questions. Clearer transparency and control over data sharing would be appreciated.
Here on Fedora 42 I couldn't past "Waiting for auth... (Press ESC to cancel)" when selecting Auth Method,However switching to gnome-terminal got that working.
They have all hardware and most advanced LLM technology, I don't know why their market value didn't catch up with microsoft.
It never hit me this hard how rich google is. 60 rpm for free!
Definitely not as nice as using Cline or Kilo Code within VS Code - one thing I ran into right away was that I wanted it to compare the current repo/project it was started in with another repo/project in a different directory. It won't do that:" I cannot access files using relative paths that go outside of my designated project directory". I can do that in KiloCode for sure and it's been pretty handy.
I want something like this but that can talk to my local AI servers. I'm not a fan of cloud-based AI.
I use aichat now but it's not perfect. https://github.com/sigoden/aichat
The UI on this tool is much better.
It looked semi-interesting, until reading this line: "So what are you waiting for? Upgrade your terminal experience with Gemini CLI today". Why does what seems to be a developer-oriented tool, need to use that awful LinkedIn/Corpospeak language, oh why?
It's kind of cool to see big frontier ai tools being exclusive to a terminal window. It really takes me back
Just refactored 1000 lines of Claude Code generated to 500 lines with Gemini Pro 2.5 ! Very impressed by the overall agentic experience and model performance.
Giving this a try, I'm rather astounded how effective my tests have gone.
That's a ton of free limit. This has been immensely more successful than void ide.
I spent 8k tokens after giving the interface 'cd ../<other-dir>', resulting in Gemini explaining that it can't see the other dir outside of current scope but with recommendation ls files in that dir. Which then reminded me of my core belief that we will always have to be above these tools in order to understand and execute. I wonder if/when I'll be wrong.
I played around with it to automate GitHub tasks for me (tagging and sorting PRs and stuff). Sometimes it needs a little push to use the API instead of web search, but then it even installs the right tools (like gh) for you. https://youtu.be/LP1FtpIEan4
That's giving a lot away for free! When I was using Gemini 2.5 Pro intensively for automated work and regularly hitting the 1000 requests per day limit, it could easily cost $50+ per day with a large context. I imagine after a couple months they'll probably limit the free offering to a cheaper model.
Are there any LLMs that offer ZSH plugins that integrate with command history, previous command outputs, system clipboard etc to assist writing the next command? Stuff like gemini/copilot CLI don't feel particularly useful to me. I'm not gonna type "?? print last 30 lines of this file"
- [deleted]
why’d the release post vanish this morning and then show up again 8 hours later like nothing happened. some infra panic or last-minute model weirdness. was midway embedding my whole notes dir when the repo 404’d and I thought y’all pulled a firebase moment.. what's the real story?
Everyone writing the same thing now lol, its plainly obvious this is the workflow best suited to llms
I have access to Gemini through Workspace, but despite spending quite a while trying to find out how, I cannot figure out how to use that in Copilot. All I seem to be able to find is information on the personal account or enterprise tiers, neither of which I have.
Wow, this is next-level. I can't believe this is free. This blows cline out of the water!
I like it. Yesterday I installed it and let it check some if our udev rules. udevadm verify found some issues, but gemini found much more, and it was much easier to use than Claude.
How does this compare to OpenCode and OAI's Codex? Those two are also free, they work with any LLM.
I wish the menus were more accessible to screen readers on Windows Terminal, Powershell. NVDA just says "blank" when I arrow through, for example, the authorization choices.
TIL about several more cool gemini-powered prototyping tools: both 1) Canvas tool option in Gemini web (!) app and 2) Build panel in Google AI Studio can generate amazing multi-file shareable web apps in seconds.
been testing edge cases - is the 1M context actually flat or does token position, structure or semantic grouping change how attention gets distributed? when I feed in 20 files, sometimes mid-position content gets pulled harder than stuff at the end. feels like it’s not just order, but something deeper - ig the model’s building a memory map with internal weighting. if there’s any semantic chunking or attention-aware preprocessing happening before inference, then layout starts mattering more than size. prompt design becomes spatial. any internal tooling to trace which segments are influencing output?
- [deleted]
Is there any way to run this inside a docker container? When I tried, it barfed trying to run `xdg-open`. And I don't see any auth-related options in the `--help` output.
Does anyone know what Google's policy on retention and training use will be when using the free version by signing in with a personal Google account? Like many others, I don't want my proprietary codebase stored permanently on Google servers or used to train their models.
At the bottom of README.md, they state:
"This project leverages the Gemini APIs to provide AI capabilities. For details on the terms of service governing the Gemini API, please refer to the terms for the access mechanism you are using:
* Gemini API key
* Gemini Code Assist
* Vertex AI"
The Gemini API terms state: "for Unpaid Services, all content and responses is retained, subject to human review, and used for training".
The Gemini Code Assist terms trifurcate for individuals, Standard / Enterprise, and Cloud Code (presumably not relevant).
* For individuals: "When you use Gemini Code Assist for individuals, Google collects your prompts, related code, generated output, code edits, related feature usage information, and your feedback to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies."
* For Standard and Enterprise: "To help protect the privacy of your data, Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise conform to Google's privacy commitment with generative AI technologies. This commitment includes items such as the following: Google doesn't use your data to train our models without your permission."
The Vertex AI terms state "Google will not use Customer Data to train or fine-tune any AI/ML models without Customer's prior permission or instruction."
What a confusing array of offerings and terms! I am left without certainty as to the answer to my original question. When using the free version by signing in with a personal Google account, which doesn't require a Gemini API key and isn't Gemini Code Assist or Vertex AI, it's not clear which access mechanism I am using or which terms apply.
It's also disappointing "Google's privacy commitment with generative AI technologies" which promises that "Google doesn't use your data to train our models without your permission" doesn't seem to apply to individuals.
I thought the hero image was a video with a "Play" button, I kept trying to press on it to play the video...
symptomatic of Google's lack of innovation and pm's rushing to copy competitor products
better question is why do you need a modle specific CLI when you should be able to plug in to individual models.
How am I supposed to use this when actually working on a cli? The sign in doesn’t display s link I can open. Presumably it’s trying and failing to open firefox?
In my experience Gemini is consistently more conservative and poor at reasoning/regurgitates, like a local Llama instance.
It almost immediately switches to flash. I'll stay with the aistudio and repomix.
I really wish these AI companies would STOP innovating until they work out how to let us “download all files” on the chat page.
We are now three years into the AI revolution and they are still forcing us to copy and paste and click click crazy to get the damn files out.
STOP innovating. STOP the features.
Form a team of 500 of your best developers. Allocate a year and a billion dollar budget.
Get all those Ai super scientists into the job.
See if you can work out “download all files”. A problem on the scale of AGI or Dark Matter, but one day google or OpenAI will crack the problem.
Sweet, I love Claude and was raring to try out their CLI that dropped a few days ago, but don't have a sub. This looks to be free
Nice, at least i could get rid of the broken Warp CLI which prevents offline usage with their automatic cloud ai feature enabled.
Is the CLI ideal for coding assistants, or is the real draw using Anthropic models in their pure, unmediated form?
An aside, but with Claude Code and now Gemini instrumenting operations with OpenTelemetry by default, this is very cool.
I tried using it for something non-trivial. And:
> 429: Too many requests
Mind you, this is with a paid API key
This is awesome! We recently started using Xander (https://xander.bot). We've found it's even better to assign PMs to Xander on Linear comments and get a PR. Then, the PM can validate the implementation in a preview environment, and engineers (or another AI) can review the code.
"Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent"
I hate this openwashing. It's a closed model, its weights are nowhere to be seen! (not to mention the training data, the real "source" of a LLM)
The fact that there is a small component that is open source that accesses this closed model doesn't change that at all.
Immediately tries to access ~/Documents and Apple Music. What the?
does it share code with google? or rather, if you use it, does it become likely someone else will get the same code if they tried to reproduce your product?
So this is Claude code for Google. The cycle is complete.
Whoa. Who at Google thought providing this as an example of how to test your API key was a good idea?
This is shown at the top of the screen in https://aistudio.google.com/apikey as the suggested quick start for testing your API key out.
Not a great look. I let our GCloud TAM know. But still.
Whether any CLI interactions are used to train the model or no ?
Grateful that this one supports Windows out of the box.
Well, color me not impressed. On my very first few tries, out of 10 short-ish (no more than 300 lines) python scripts I asked it to clean up and refactor, 4 of them it mangled to not even run any more, because of syntax (mostly quoting) errors and mis-indenting. Claude has never done that.
- [deleted]
Gemini, convert my disk from MBR to GPT
I was rather disappointed and confused that the "Google One" or "Google AI Pro" subscription does not give you access to use Gemini API keys, and you can't use this Gemini CLI either.
Google services have become a patchwork of painfully confounding marketing terms that mean nothing and obfuscate what they actually provide.
Does Gemini CLI require API access?
Hmm, with Claude code at $200+tax, this seems to be alternative which comes out at free or $299+tax a YEAR if I need more which is great. I found that buried at developers.google.com
Gemini Pro and Claude play off of each other really well.
Just started playing with Gemini CLI and one thing I miss immediately from Claude code is being able to write and interject as the AI does its work. Sometimes I interject by just saying stop, it stops and waits for more context or input or ai add something I forgot and it picks it up..
Yes i would like to generate videos of a cat on an airplane. Such value, much wow.
Nice work excited to use it!
The plugin is getting bad reviews this morning. It doesn't work for me on latest Pycharm.
In google colab, how are we supposed to run it?
Well, not sure that it makes sense to do it, anyway I've tried to run in in a cell and in the google colab terminal. Still waiting for auth (?)
google gonna win
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
In the screenshot it's asked about Gemini CLI and it says its going to search the web and read the README.md - what ever did we do before AI /s
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
typescript :facepalm:
Another JS implementation…
I do not get it why they don’t pick Go or Rust so i get a binary.
I neeeed this google login method in sst's opencode now haha
Boring. Any non llm news?
Why do anyone build things for the console on javascript/typescript?
I don't think I'll ever use tools like this, I know CLI is cool and all but I prefer a GUI always
Google trying very hard to get people hooked on their product. Spending billions in marketing, product development, advertising.
Not impressed. These companies have billions at their disposal, and probably pay $0 in tax, and the best they can come up with is this?
Npx again ;-( Why are people continuously using it for cli applications?
While writing this comment, thinking that there should be some packaging tool that would create a binaries from npx cli tools. I remember such things for python. Binaries were fat, but it is better then keep nodejs installed on my OS