Gemini CLI

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.

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.

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.

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.

>If you use this, all of your code data will be sent to Google.

Not if you pay for it.

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.

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/...

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.

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.

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

You’d think with all this AI tooling they'd be able to organize better, but I think that the AI Age will be a very messy one with messaging and content

I was just trying to figure out if I get anything as a pro user. Thank you, you answered my question.

This is very confusing how they post about this on X, you would think you get additional usage. Messaging is very confusing.

I had a conversation with Copilot about Copilot offerings. Here's what they told me:

If I Could Talk to Satya...

I'd say:

“Hey Satya, love the Copilots—but maybe we need a Copilot for Copilots to help people figure out which one they need!”

Then I had them print out a table of Copilot plans:

- Microsoft Copilot Free - Github Copilot Free - Github Copilot Pro - Github Copilot Pro+ - Microsoft Copilot Pro (can only be purchased for personal accounts) - Microsoft 365 Copilot (can't be used with personal accounts and can only be purchased by an organization)

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.

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.

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!!

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, 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

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...

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

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).

i have a Google AI Pro subscription - what kind of credits/usage/allowance do i get towards gemini cli ?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

See 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

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Same here.

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

what's your workflow?

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

I've had a good experience with https://kilocode.ai

It integrates with VS Code, which suits my workflow better. And buying credits through them (at cost) means I can use any model I want without juggling top-ups across several different billing profiles.

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.

Yes they do. Scroll to bottom of Github readme

>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:

Click Gemini API, scroll

>When you use Unpaid Services, including, for example, Google AI Studio and the unpaid quota on Gemini API, Google uses the content you submit to the Services and any generated responses to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies, including Google's enterprise features, products, and services, consistent with our Privacy Policy.

>To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output. Google takes steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting this data from your Google Account, API key, and Cloud project before reviewers see or annotate it. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services.

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

do you mean the genai endpoints?

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

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.

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.

It says in the pricing page (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing) that free usage can be used to improve products, may be for them it makes sense to beta release to free users first https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms

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!!!

I love healthy competition that leads to better use experiences

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

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.

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

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.

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

Ha. It would be naive to think that a CLI tool from an adtech giant won't exploit as much data as it can collect.

What's wrong here?

it's wrapped in TLS, is ok.

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.

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.

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.

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.