Google agy CLI
Shares rank 24 of 41 coding agents by recommenders
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.
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.
32 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 20
- approval share
- 38%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Solid on recent Gemini Flash models
“agy had some issues with Flash 3.5, but has been pretty solid for me since Flash 3.8”
Comment from 30 Sep 2026 in “Gemini 4 Argon” “AGY with Gemini 3.8 flash cooked last couple of times”
Comment from 30 Sep 2026 in “Gemini 4 Argon” Easy drop-in for other coding agents
“Switching for many is easy, you just run agy cli instead of claude/codex”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Gemini 4 Carbon” “it was just fine as a drop-in replacement for my usage”
Comment from 30 May 2026 in “Google's Antigravity Bait and Switch”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Often unusable or erratic
“often goes off the rails completely, including writing code outside of the "sandbox."”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “AI Job Grief: The Unnamed Psychological Crisis Hitting Tech Workers” “Otherwise it is COMPLETELY unusable and it shocks me when I hear people are using it.”
Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking” “the agy cli wrapper makes the experience completely unusable”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash” - Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”
Weak on complex or agentic work
“Both antigravity and agy are toys compared to what has been available for at least two years.”
Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Anthropic S-1” “Agy is basically useless for more complex problems as far as I am concerned”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber” “Gemini is terrible at agentic coding, primarily because Agy is terrible.”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber” - Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “Quick impressions: A week of using Codex more than Claude”
Requests excessive permissions for routine operations
“authorizing ls, grep, ps, find... doesn't seem like corner cases to me”
Comment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Pi 1.0” “Agy as a harness also has a tendency to constantly request significant elevations to perform routine operations”
Comment from 14 Aug 2026 in “Gemini 3.7 Flash” Unclear or missing context compaction
“it's horrible because of its very indeterminate context compaction”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “Gemini 4 Argon” “I'm pretty sure it doesn't have compaction?”
Comment from 30 Sep 2026 in “Gemini 4 Argon”
Other coding agents people recommend
The four most recommended other coding agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 571 | 993 | 37% | 12 | 1 yr46 owners | — |
| oh-my-pi | 104 | 28 | 79% | 9 | 2 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Grok Build CLI | 66 | 114 | 37% | 6 | — | — |
| DeepSeek Harness | 63 | 28 | 69% | 4 | 1 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Google agy CLIThis page | 12 | 20 | 38% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
32 of the 34 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Switching for many is easy, you just run agy cli instead of claude/codex”
“Both antigravity and agy are toys compared to what has been available for at least two years.”
“it's horrible because of its very indeterminate context compaction”
“agy wants me to upgrade to... AI Ultra.”
“Google has proven themselves to be capricious and arbitrary when it comes to TOS enforcement”
“authorizing ls, grep, ps, find... doesn't seem like corner cases to me”
“it does indeed support skills, sub-agents with pretty good inter-agent communication”
“Using agy is like going back in time.”
“They've got Zed, VSCode, Jetbrains... But no Emacs or NeoVIM”
“the usage limit was very generous.”
“agy had some issues with Flash 3.5, but has been pretty solid for me since Flash 3.8”
“I'm not gonna use AGY again.”
“AGY with Gemini 3.8 flash cooked last couple of times”
“I'm pretty sure it doesn't have compaction?”
“I pasted the error message into agy and it proceeded to attach GDB to my GPU driver”
“Compared to gemini-cli that they took out behind the woodshed, I hate it.”
“Otherwise it is COMPLETELY unusable and it shocks me when I hear people are using it.”
“also I use agy 200usd sub for second-opinion as one of steps for false positive elimination.”
“for Gemini I use Google’s agy coding harness (or my own)”
“perhaps it's agy which frankly leaves a bit to be desired as a harness”
“It also is what Google does with agy (their TUI).”
“not be forced to use it via agy”
“but agy cli is a bit unintuitve”
“Agy as a harness also has a tendency to constantly request significant elevations to perform routine operations”
“agy couldn't find the subscription”
“Agy is basically useless for more complex problems as far as I am concerned”
“Gemini is terrible at agentic coding, primarily because Agy is terrible.”
“the agy cli wrapper makes the experience completely unusable”
“often goes off the rails completely, including writing code outside of the "sandbox."”
“it was just fine as a drop-in replacement for my usage”
“Agy cli is a giant pile of turd, at the moment”
“It wont even resize itself when i maximize terminal.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.