# Google agy CLI

12 Hacker News commenters recommended Google agy CLI and 20 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a generous, capable coding agent harness with skills and sub-agents. Critics say it asks for too many permissions and handles complex problems poorly.

## Why people recommend it

- Solid on recent Gemini Flash models (2 comments): "agy had some issues with Flash 3.5, but has been pretty solid for me since Flash 3.8" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915025)) "AGY with Gemini 3.8 flash cooked last couple of times" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914110))
- Easy drop-in for other coding agents (2 comments): "Switching for many is easy, you just run agy cli instead of claude/codex" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50278210)) "it was just fine as a drop-in replacement for my usage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48338192))

## What people warn about

- Often unusable or erratic (4 comments): "often goes off the rails completely, including writing code outside of the "sandbox."" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349562)) "Otherwise it is COMPLETELY unusable and it shocks me when I hear people are using it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720181)) "the agy cli wrapper makes the experience completely unusable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669376))
- Weak on complex or agentic work (4 comments): "Both antigravity and agy are toys compared to what has been available for at least two years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50256647)) "Agy is basically useless for more complex problems as far as I am concerned" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000731)) "Gemini is terrible at agentic coding, primarily because Agy is terrible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000337))
- Requests excessive permissions for routine operations (2 comments): "authorizing ls, grep, ps, find... doesn't seem like corner cases to me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936757)) "Agy as a harness also has a tendency to constantly request significant elevations to perform routine operations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293601))
- Unclear or missing context compaction (2 comments): "it's horrible because of its very indeterminate context compaction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50080685)) "I'm pretty sure it doesn't have compaction?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914051))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GitHub Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-copilot.md): 571 recommend
- [oh-my-pi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oh-my-pi.md): 104 recommend
- [Grok Build CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok-build.md): 66 recommend
- [DeepSeek Harness](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-harness.md): 63 recommend
- [Claude Code VS Code extension](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-code-vs-code-extension.md): 31 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google agy CLI", https://hackerapproved.com/p/agy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).