Gemini CLI

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.

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.

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/...

I actually had this exact same question when I read the docs, made an issue about it:

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/1427

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.

And they say our scale up is siloed. Leave it to google to show' em.

You don't get API keys for that subscription because it's a flat monthly cost.

> Delightful!

You clearly have never had the "pleasure" to work with a Google product manager.

Especially the kind that were hired in the last 15-ish years.

This type of situation is absolutely typical, and probably one of the more benign thing among the general blight they typically inflict on Google's product offering.

The cartesian product of pricing options X models is an effing nightmare to navigate.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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
    - GoogleSearch

it would be cool to work with my google ai pro sub

one piece of feedback. Please do neovim on top of vim or have a way to customize the editor beyond your list.

How often did you use gemini-cli to build on gemini-cli?

> Hi - I work on this.

There was a time where Google produced products that had:

   - 1 logo
   - 1 text field
   - 2 buttons.

This ended up being a sizable part of why Google became so successful.

I would suggest that you allow yourself and your team to be visited by the spirit of those days.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

Node can also produce a single binary executable: https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html

> and doesn't require you to install a runtime like Node.

My exact same reaction when I read the install notes.

Even python would have been better.

Having to install that Javascript cancer on my laptop just to be able to try this, is a huge no.

My thoughts exactly. Neither Rust not Go, not even C/C++ which I could accept if there were some native OS dependencies. Maybe this is a hint on who could be its main audience.

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

Same here.

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.

what's your workflow?

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

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.

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.

    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>

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

do you mean the genai endpoints?

Or aider. In any case, while top llms will likely remain proprietary for some time, there is no reason for these tools to be closed source or tied to a particular llm vendor.

It's firmly on the radar - we will have a great answer for this soon.

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.

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

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.

What’s neat is we can proxy requests from Gemini or fork it with only replacing the api call layer so it can be used with local models!!!

As a heavy Claude code user that's not really a selling point for me

Ultimately quality wins out with LLMs. Having switched a lot between openai, google and Claude, I feel there's essentially 0 switching cost and you very quickly get to feel which is the best. So until Claude has a solid competitor I'll use it, open source or not

I love healthy competition that leads to better use experiences

can disable it from accessibility setting. it does show model thinking instead of joke when that’s available.

They sent you swag in the mail? How did that work?

    Sends the user swag stickers with love from Anthropic.",bq2=`This tool should be used whenever a user expresses interest in receiving Anthropic or Claude stickers, swag, or merchandise. When triggered, it will display a shipping form for the user to enter their mailing address and contact details. Once submitted, Anthropic will process the request and ship stickers to the provided address.
    
    Common trigger phrases to watch for:
    - "Can I get some Anthropic stickers please?"
    - "How do I get Anthropic swag?"
    - "I'd love some Claude stickers"
    - "Where can I get merchandise?"
    - Any mention of wanting stickers or swag
    
    The tool handles the entire request process by showing an interactive form to collect shipping information.

If Claude code is any indication it's because they can tweak it and dogfood to extract maximum performance from it. I strongly prefer Claude code to aider - irrespective of the max plan.

Haven't used Jules or codex yet since I've been happy and am working on optimizing my current workflow

Aider is what you want for that.

check out opencode by sst

Disclaimar: I haven't used aider in probably a year. I found Aider to require much more understanding to use properly. Claude code _just works_, more or less out of the box. Assuming the Gemini team took cues from CC—I'm guessing it's more user-friendly than Aider.

Again, I haven't used aider in a while so perhaps that's not the case.

Claude Code and OpenAI Codex and presumably this are much much more aggressive about generating work for themselves than Aider is.

For complicated changes Aider is much more likely to stop and need help, whereas Claude Code will just go and go and end up with something.

Whether that's worth the different economic model is up to you and your style and what you're working on.

It seems you are still using the web interface.

When you hop over to platforms that use the API, the files get written/edited in situ. No copy/pasting. No hunting for where to insert edited code.

Trust me it's a total game changer to switch. I spent so much time copy/pasting before moving over.

This edits the files directly. Using a chat hasn't been an optimal workflow for a while now.

What does this even mean lol. "Download all files"...?

No per-token billing here either: "...we offer the industry’s largest allowance: 60 model requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day at no charge."

https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...

If you use your personal gmail account without billing enabled, you get generous requests and never have to worry about a surprise bill.

Same. Generally i really prefer Claude Code's UX (CLI based, permissions, etc) - it's all generally close to right for me, but not perfect.

However i didn't use Claude Code before the Max plan because i just fret about some untrusted AI going ham on some stupid logic and burning credits.

If it's dumb on Max i don't mind, just some time wasted. If it's dumb on credits, i just paid for throw away work. Mentally it's just too much overhead for me as i end up worrying about Claude's journey, not just the destination. And the journey is often really bad, even for Claude.

That's a golden cage and you limit yourself to Anthropic only.

I'm happy I can switch models as I like with Aider. The top models from different companies see different things in my experiences and have their own strengths and weaknesses. I also do not see Anthropic's models on the top of my (subjective) list.

How does that compare to using aider with Claude models?

This insistence by SAAS vendors upon not protecting you from financial ruin must surely be some sort of deadweight loss.

Sure you might make a few quick wins from careless users but overall it creates an environment of distrust where users are watching their pennies and lots are even just standing off.

I can accept that with all the different moving parts this may be a trickier problem than a pre paid pump, or even a Telco, and while to a product manager this might look like a lot of work/money for something that “prevents” users overspending.

But we all know that’s shortsighted and stupid and its the kind of thinking that broadly signals more competition is required.