Gemini CLI

What hackers pick instead

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Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 666 comments. Each links to the original.

1. my only use case for it now is triple checking specifications for drift inconsistencies beyond that I find it pretty lacking compared to codex and cc

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

2. harnesses created by the model providers (OpenAI/Codex CLI, Anthropic/Claude Code, Google/Gemini CLI) tend to be better than generalist harnesses

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Karpathy: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks”

3. Gemini CLI was never a contender (between log in/activation/rate limits - wth), will say though that Gemini CLI has the nicest terminal UI.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max”

4. Just this afternoon Gemini 3 via the Gemini CLI fixed a whole slate of bugs that Claude Code simply could not, basically in one shot.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Claude Opus 4.5”

5. It's a Frankenstein('s monster) of a project from all perspectives, which is a shame, since I'm rather fond of the interface

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

6. Gemini just made me Linux GCODE displayer just by repeatedly viewing the picture and modifying the code, all by itself.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Why xor eax, eax?”

7. gemini-cli the url and asked for a script. The LLMs are pretty good at this sort of simple but tedious implementation.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli (2023)”

8. When I run out of Gemini 2.5 Pro and it falls back to the Flash model, the Flash model is absolute trash for sure.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography”

9. I've had a lot of luck promoting gemini-cli to implement whatever I want in home assistant, and it's pretty good

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Home Assistant waters my plants”

10. I can use gemini-cli with English descriptions of features or entire projects and it just cranks out the code.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era”

11. They drastically reduced limits on their best model so that's likely how you got stuck downgrading model

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark”

12. I initially enjoyed the 5-hour limits on Gemini CLI and Antigravity so much that I paid for a full year

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Pro Max 5x Quota Exhausted in 1.5 Hours Despite Moderate Usage”

13. I strongly encourage you to try one out (even if it's just something on the free tier eg. gemini-cli)

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R”

14. Antigravity, Jules, and Gemini CLI are as good as the alternatives but are way more cost effective.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

15. The free model is a distant third for coding, but it's fine for leaf node work in a larger project.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out”

16. You can usually count on Claude Code or Codex or Gemini CLI to support the model features the best

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Mysti – Claude, Codex, and Gemini debate your code, then synthesize”

17. Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “End of Japanese community”

18. Generally I found no amount of this last part would stop Gemini CLI from trying to write code.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Shall I implement it? No”

19. it's very good (but the cli and the user experience are not on par with codex or claude yet)

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Codex vs. Claude Code (Today)”

20. Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably "the right way"

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Opus 4.5 is going to change everything”

21. The UI is better - they box the specific types of actions the orchestrator agent takes

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Gemini 3 Flash in Gemini CLI is better than Claude Code”

22. I built a Nostr web client without looking at code or touching the IDE with Gemini CLI

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.”

23. Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably the right way

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Opus 4.5 is going to change everything”

24. I can just keep on going using Gemini/GeminiCLI for absolutely no cost it seems like.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The $100B Megadeal Between OpenAI and Nvidia Is on Ice”

25. in the Gemini CLI with a prompt like, "I'd like to add support. What are my options? Don't write any code yet" it will proceed to skip right past telling me my options

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

26. Gemini is so trigger happy, the moment you don’t tell it „don’t make any changes“ it runs off and starts doing all kind of unrelated refactorings.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Gemini 3 Deep Think”

27. Gemini CLI is a rather bad product. There is (was?) an issue that makes the CLI fall back to flash very soon in every session.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Gemini 3”

28. First they sent a message saying the Ultra plan is ending, with no other option for a Workspace use to buy an equivalent plan.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

29. gemini-cli sucks but Google sucks even more but discontinuing it to relaunch it with another name a tool that still sucks

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

30. Google really can't help themselves but to have some internal re-org kill off a public thing people are actively using.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

31. I've been building with Gemini CLI the past few days and had an increasing amount of issues getting a request through.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw”

32. Gemini Cli was already losing and it’s now being replaced by something they’re saying doesn’t yet have feature parity.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

33. It will try reasonably hard to get you out of Python dependency hell, and (more important) it generally knows when to give up.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Mistral OCR 3”

34. It's great that gemini-cli is open-source, but that also comes with a bunch of ai-generated issues and pull-requests

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026”

35. since it's working in similar fashion to Claude Code and making targeted edits (string replacements) to files

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Opus 4.5 is going to change everything”

36. it is usually fast, but if gemini-cli or any other coding agent is sluggish I quit using it for a while

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Mistral Medium 3.5”

37. Gemini CLI via a Google One plan is the regular consumer billing flow which is pretty straightforward.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed”

38. Gemini CLI has come a long way and is arguably likely to surpass Claude Code at this rate of progress.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed”

39. the one real awkward part of plan mode is that the harness can't run commands, even exploratory ones

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Plan mode is dead”

40. Very handy, I run Gemini-cli and codex subagents in parallel to validate plans or implementations.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Claude Opus 4.5”