thor-rodrigues 2025-06-25 13:13 UTC link

Link of announcement blog post: https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...

ed_mercer 2025-06-25 13:28 UTC link

> That’s why we’re introducing Gemini CLI

Definitely not because of Claude Code eating our lunch!

asadm 2025-06-25 13:35 UTC link

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.

iandanforth 2025-06-25 13:37 UTC link

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!

ZeroCool2u 2025-06-25 13:39 UTC link

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.

cperry 2025-06-25 13:50 UTC link

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.

meetpateltech 2025-06-25 13:52 UTC link

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)

lazarie 2025-06-25 14:04 UTC link

"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...

barbazoo 2025-06-25 14:30 UTC link

> 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?

wohoef 2025-06-25 14:51 UTC link

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

ipsum2 2025-06-25 16:21 UTC link

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.

jonbaer 2025-06-25 16:22 UTC link

-y, --yolo Automatically accept all actions (aka YOLO mode, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0 for more details)? [boolean] [default: false]

joelm 2025-06-25 16:56 UTC link

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! :)

simonw 2025-06-25 18:16 UTC link

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/

sameermanek 2025-06-25 19:06 UTC link

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.

eisbaw 2025-06-25 19:42 UTC link

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

mike-bailey 2025-06-25 23:50 UTC link

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://getvoicemode.com

- https://github.com/mbailey/voicemode

# Installation (~/.gemini/settings.json)

{

  "theme": "Dracula",  

  "selectedAuthType": "oauth-personal",  

  "mcpServers": {  

    "voice-mode": {  

      "command": "uvx",  

      "args": [  

        "voice-mode"  

      ]  

    }  

  }  

}

tobyhinloopen 2025-06-26 06:19 UTC link

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)

andreagrandi 2025-06-26 11:31 UTC link

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 :/

hmate9 2025-06-26 13:28 UTC link

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.

troupo 2025-06-25 13:35 UTC link

And since they have essentially unlimited money they can offer a lot for free/cheaply, until all competitors die out, and then they can crank up the prices

zackify 2025-06-25 13:37 UTC link

When I was using it in cursor recently, I found it would break imports in large python files. Claude never did this. Do you have any weird issues using Gemini? I’m excited to try the cli today

bayindirh 2025-06-25 13:39 UTC link

There's also $300/mo AI ULTRA membership. It's interesting. Google One memberships even can't detail what "extra features" I can have, because it possibly changes every hour or so.

iainmerrick 2025-06-25 13:43 UTC link

Looks like you could make a standalone executable with Bun and/or Deno:

https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables

https://docs.deno.com/runtime/reference/cli/compile/

Note, I haven't checked that this actually works, although if it's straightforward Node code without any weird extensions it should work in Bun at least. I'd be curious to see how the exe size compares to Go and Rust!

fhinkel 2025-06-25 13:45 UTC link

Ask Gemini CLI to re-write itself in your preferred language

unshavedyak 2025-06-25 13:49 UTC link

Yea, i'm not even really interested in Gemini atm because last i tried 2.5 Pro it was really difficult to shape behavior. It would be too wordy, or offer too many comments, etc - i couldn't seem to change some base behaviors, get it to focus on just one thing.

Which is surprising because at first i was ready to re-up my Google life. I've been very anti-Google for ages, but at first 2.5 Pro looked so good that i felt it was a huge winner. It just wasn't enjoyable to use because i was often at war with it.

Sonnet/Opus via Claude Code are definitely less intelligent than my early tests of 2.5 Pro, but they're reasonable, listen, stay on task and etc.

I'm sure i'll retry eventually though. Though the subscription complexity with Gemini sounds annoying.

qsort 2025-06-25 13:50 UTC link

Projects like this have to update frequently, having a mechanism like npm or pip or whatever to automatically handle that is probably easier. It's not like the program is doing heavy lifting anyway, unless you're committing outright programming felonies there shouldn't be any issues on modern hardware.

It's the only argument I can think of, something like Go would be goated for this use case in principle.

i_love_retros 2025-06-25 13:53 UTC link

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

ebiester 2025-06-25 14:02 UTC link

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.

behnamoh 2025-06-25 14:07 UTC link

Actually, that's the reason a lot of startups and solo developers prefer non-Google solutions, even though the quality of Gemini 2.5 Pro is insanely high. The Google Cloud Dashboard is a mess, and they haven't fixed it in years. They have Vertex that is supposed to host some of their models, but I don't understand what's the difference between that and their own cloud. And then you have two different APIs depending on the level of your project: This is literally the opposite of what we would expect from an AI provider where you start small and regardless of the scale of your project, you do not face obstacles. So essentially, Google has built an API solution that does not scale because as soon as your project gets bigger, you have to switch from the Google AI Studio API to the Vertex API. And I find it ridiculous because their OpenAI compatible API does not work all the time. And a lot of tools that rely on that actually don't work.

Google's AI offerings that should be simplified/consolidated:

- Jules vs Gemini CLI?

- Vertex API (requires a Google Cloud Account) vs Google AI Studio API

Also, since Vertex depends on Google Cloud, projects get more complicated because you have to modify these in your app [1]:

``` # Replace the `GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT` and `GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION` values # with appropriate values for your project. export GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT=GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT export GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION=global export GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=True ```

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/start/...

GlebOt 2025-06-25 14:11 UTC link

Have you checked the https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c... ? It has a section for workspace accounts.

raincole 2025-06-25 14:11 UTC link

It seems that you need to set up an env variable called GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/1434

... and other stuff.

__MatrixMan__ 2025-06-25 14:22 UTC link

Anthropic is the same. Unless it has changed within the last few months, you can subscribe to Claude but if you want to use Claude Code it'll come out of your "API usage" bucket which is billed separately than the subscription.

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

Workaround is to use their GUI with some MCPs but I dislike it because window navigation is just clunky compared to terminal multiplexer navigation.

GardenLetter27 2025-06-25 14:29 UTC link

Google is fumbling the bag so badly with the pricing.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model I've used (even better than o3 IMO) and yet there's no simple Claude/Cursor like subscription to just get full access.

Nevermind Enterprise users too, where OpenAI has it locked up.

jstummbillig 2025-06-25 14:29 UTC link

I find it hard to imagine that any of the major model vendors are suffering from demand shortages right now (if that's what you mean?)

If you mean: This is "inspired" by the success of Claude Code. Sure, I guess, but it's also not like Claude Code brought anything entirely new to the table. There is a lot of copying from each other and continually improving upon that, and it's great for the users and model providers alike.

raincole 2025-06-25 14:34 UTC link

Because Google is rich and they'd like to get you hooked. Just like how ChatGPT has a free tier.

Also they can throttle the service whenever they feel it's too costly.

zxspectrum1982 2025-06-25 14:54 UTC link

Same here.

bsenftner 2025-06-25 14:57 UTC link

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.

leumon 2025-06-25 15:00 UTC link

My guess: So that they can get more training data to improve their models which will eventually be subscription only.

AJ007 2025-06-25 15:06 UTC link

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.

jabroni_salad 2025-06-25 15:25 UTC link

They recently discontinued the main Gemini free tier which offered similar limits. I would say expect this to disappear when it hits GA or if it gets a lot of targeted abuse.

_zoltan_ 2025-06-25 15:27 UTC link

what's your workflow?

dawnofdusk 2025-06-25 15:32 UTC link

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.

dawnofdusk 2025-06-25 15:34 UTC link

diegof79 2025-06-25 15:43 UTC link

Google suffers from Microsoft's issues: it has products for almost everything, but its confusing product messaging dilutes all the good things it does.

I like Gemini 2.5 Pro, too, and recently, I tried different AI products (including the Gemini Pro plan) because I wanted a good AI chat assistant for everyday use. But I also wanted to reduce my spending and have fewer subscriptions.

The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One, which is very convenient if you use Google Drive. But I already have an iCloud subscription tightly integrated with iOS, so switching to Drive and losing access to other iCloud functionality (like passwords) wasn’t in my plans.

Then there is the Gemini chat UI, which is light years behind the OpenAI ChatGPT client for macOS.

NotebookLM is good at summarizing documents, but the experience isn’t integrated with the Gemini chat, so it’s like constantly switching between Google products without a good integrated experience.

The result is that I end up paying a subscription to Raycast AI because the chat app is very well integrated with other Raycast functions, and I can try out models. I don’t get the latest model immediately, but it has an integrated experience with my workflow.

My point in this long description is that by being spread across many products, Google is losing on the UX side compared to OpenAI (for general tasks) or Anthropic (for coding). In just a few months, Google tried to catch up with v0 (Google Stitch), GH Copilot/Cursor (with that half-baked VSCode plugin), and now Claude Code. But all the attempts look like side-projects that will be killed soon.

jart 2025-06-25 16:22 UTC link

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

TechDebtDevin 2025-06-25 16:24 UTC link

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.

crazylogger 2025-06-25 16:35 UTC link

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.

mattzito 2025-06-25 16:44 UTC link

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.

mil22 2025-06-25 17:11 UTC link

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...

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