Yeah, I'm not sure if it's still there (their source code is increasingly obfuscated) but if you check out the source for the first public version (0.2.9) you'll see the following:
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.
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
yeah we already seen this with gemini 2.5 flash. Gemini 2.0 is such a work horse for API model with great price. Gemini 2.5 flash lite same price but is not as good except math and coding (very niche use case for API key)
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.
> It would be too wordy, or offer too many comments
Wholeheartedly agree.
Both when chatting in text mode or when asking it to produce code.
The verbosity of the code is the worse. Comments often longer than the actual code, every nook and cranny of an algorithm unrolled over 100's of lines, most of which unnecessary.
Feels like typical code a mediocre Java developer would produce in the early 2000's
I've found that Gemini 2.5 Pro is pretty good at analyzing existing code, but really bad at generating a new code. When I use Gemini with Aider, my session usually went like:
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>
Whereas Sonnet/Opus on average took me more tries to get it to the implementation plan that I'm satisfied with, but it's so much easier to steer to make it produce the code that I want.
When I use amazon-q for this, I make it write a plan into a markdown file, then I clear context and tell it to read that file and execute that plan phase by phase. This is with Sonnet 4.
Sometimes I also yeet that file to Codex and see which implementation is better. Clear context, read that file again, give it a diff that codex produce and tell it do a review.
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.
ai power users will drop shit immediately, yes they probably have long term contracts with companies but anyone seriously engaged has switched to claude code now (probably including many devs AT openai/google/etc.)
If you don't think claude code is just miles ahead of other things you haven't been using it (or well)
I am certain they keep metrics on those "power users" (especially since they probably work there) and when everyone drops what they were using and moves to a specific tool that is something they should be careful of.
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
The killer feature of Claude Code is that you can just pay for Max and not worry about API billing. It lets me use it pretty much all the time without stressing over every penny or checking the billing page.
Until they do that - I'm sticking with Claude.
I did a little digging into this just yesterday. The impression I got was that Claude Code was pretty great, but also used a _lot_ more tokens than similar work using aider. Conversations I saw stated 5-10x more.
So yes with Claude Code you can grab the Max plan and not worry too much about usage. With Aider you'll be paying per API call, but it will cost quite a bit less than the similar work if using Claude Code in API-mode.
I concluded that – for me – Claude Code _may_ give me better results, but Aider will likely be cheaper than Claude Code in either API-mode or subscription-mode. Also I like that I really can fill up the aider context window if I want to, and I'm in control of that.
> I concluded that – for me – Claude Code _may_ give me better results, but Aider will likely be cheaper than Claude Code in either API-mode or subscription-mode.
I'd be pretty surprised if that was the case - something like ~8 hours of Aider use against Claude can spend $20, which is how much Claude Pro costs.
Using Claude models in aider burns tokens you need to top up. With Claude Max subscription you can pay a 100 or 200 USD per month plan and use their internal tool claude code without the need to buy additional pay as you go tokens. You get a "flatrate", the higher plan gives you more usage with less rate limiting.
Aider and Claude Code/Gemini CLI agentic stuff operate differently.
You can think of Aider as being a semi-auto LLM process. First you ask it to do something. It goes through a generate -> reflect -> refine loop until it feels like it has achieved the goal you give it. Aider has a reflection limit so it'll only do this loop a limited number of times and then it will add/remove the code that it deems fit. Then it'll give you instructions to run. You can run those instructions (e.g. to actually run a script) and then append the results from the run into the context to get it to fix any issues, but this is optional. What you send in the context and what you ask the models to do are in your hands. This makes iteration slower and the LLM does less but it also can potentially keep costs lower depending on what you delegate to the LLM and how often you iterate with it.
Claude Code, Codex, and I suspect Gemini CLI on the other hand will autonomously run your code then use the output to continue refining its approach autonomously until the goal is reached. This can consume many more tokens, potentially, than hand guiding Aider, because its potential for iteration is so much longer. But Claude Code and the like also need a lot less direction to make progress. You can, for example, ask it to do a big refactor and then just leave to lunch and come back to see if the refactor is done. Aider will require babying the whole way.
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.
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."
Don’t know about Claude, but usually Google’s free offers have no privacy protections whatsoever — all data is kept and used for training purposes, including manual human review.
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.
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.
If I have a CC linked to my personal Google for my Google One storage and YouTube Premium, that doesn't make me "billing enabled" for Gemini CLI does it?
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
Even if you don't care about open source, you should care about all the obfuscation happening in the prompts/models being used by Cursor/Claude Code/etc. With everything hidden, you could be paying 200/mo and get served Haiku instead of Sonnet/Opus. Or you could be getting 1k tokens of your code inserted as context instead of 100k to save on inference costs.
I have been using this for about a month and it’s a beast, mostly thanks to 2.5pro being SOTA and also how it leverages that huge 1M context window. Other tools either preemptively compress context or try to read files partially.
I have thrown very large codebases at this and it has been able to navigate and learn them effortlessly.
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
Ive seen it both in the Studio and via API, with various character replacements. It's weird, it's like its own dialect, the character usually corresponds to the word (or part od it) being replaced.
+1 I have not found Gemini 2.5 better than Claude's latest models -- different and better at some things, but not better in general; and in general I have found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be worse at dealing with large codebases despite its huge context window. So I too am quite curious about the workflow here.
the core idea is to not use up all of context for files but instead sessions go longer before becoming a useless pursuit ie. more turns possible with larger context window
i guess one core idea is to point it to an entrypoint or some part of code you are planning to touch. instead of asking it to load up every file etc. and then figure out the control flow.
I love how fragmented Google's Gemini offerings are. I'm a Pro subscriber, but I now learn I should be a "Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise" user to get additional usage. I didn't even know that existed! As a run of the mill Google user I get a generous usage tier but paying them specifically for "Gemini" doesn't get me anything when it comes to "Gemini CLI". Delightful!
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.
Not if you're in EU though. Even though I have zero or less AI use so far, I tinker with it. I'm more than happy to pay $200+tax for Max 20x. I'd be happy to pay same-ish for Gemini Pro.. if I knew how and where to have Gemini CLI like I do with Claude code. I have Google One. WHERE DO I SIGN UP, HOW DO I PAY AND USE IT GOOGLE? Only thing I have managed so far is through openrouter via API and credits which would amount to thousands a month if I were to use it as such, which I won't do.
What I do now is occasionally I go to AI Studio and use it for free.
Maybe their products team is also just run by Gemini, and it's changing its mind every day?
I also just got the email for Gemini ultra and I couldn't even figure out what was being offered compared to pro outside of 30tb storage vs 2tb storage!
I find it very interesting that the only way to reach Google support .... seems to be to file an issue in a competitors product (besides using X or whatever).
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
```
It took me a while but I think the difference between Vertex and Gemini APIs is that Vertex is meant for existing GCP users and Gemini API for everyone else. If you are already using GCP then Vertex API works like everything else there. If you are not, then Gemini API is much easier. But they really should spell it out, currently it's really confusing.
Also they should make it clearer which SDKs, documents, pricing, SLAs etc apply to each. I still get confused when I google up some detail and end up reading the wrong document.
The key to running LLM services in prod is setting up Gemini in Vertex, Anthropic models on AWS Bedrock and OpenAI models on Azure. It's a completely different world in terms of uptime, latency and output performance.
Have you had any luck getting your Claude quota bumped on Bedrock? I tried working through AWS support but got nowhere. Gave up and used Vertex + Gemini
Does OpenAI on azure still have that insane latency for content filtering? Last time I checked it added a huge # to time to first token, making azure hosting for real time scenarios impractical.
> I think the difference between Vertex and Gemini APIs is that Vertex is meant for existing GCP users and Gemini API for everyone else
Nahh, not really - Vertex has a HUGE feature surface, and can run a ton of models and frameworks. Gemini happens to be one of them, but you could also run non-google LLMs, non LLM stuff, run notebooks against your dataset, manage data flow and storage, and and and…
Ex-googler here. Google shipped their org hierarchy here.
Vertex API is managed by Vertex team in Google Cloud. This is a production ready infrastructure that is SRE managed but usually one or two steps from the bleeding edge.
Gemini API, Jules etc are built by Google Labs. This is close to the bleeding edge but not as production ready.
I’m a small time GCP customer for five or six years, and relatively tech competent, and I had a very difficult time getting Gemini code set up yesterday with Vertex API keys; finally I had to use gcloud to login from the CLI in combination with clicking a link and doing web sign on from Gemini. This frustrated me, not least because I have API direct calls to Vertex Gemini working from Aider, although I could not tell you exactly what incantation I finally used to make it work. In particular it didn’t look to me like the Gemini code app uses something like dotenv? I don’t recall now; upshot - could get it to tell me I was logged in wrong / had an oauth2 error / needed a project id at various times, but no inference.
What I wanted: to be able to go to a simple page tied to a google login and generate named API keys that can be used from anywhere to query Gemini models with a SINGLE key and environment variable kept in a .env file. I would prefer to pre-fill the account that debits by API usage. For an example, you could sign up for Anthropic API, OpenAI API, OpenRouter to see their customer flows. They are extremely simple in comparison to getting a new account (or even an old one) in shape to do metered billing for Gemini inference.
I then want this API key to work, regardless of what gcloud “knows” about me — am I logged in to a GCP account? Don’t care. What’s my current “Project?” Don’t care. What’s the difference between Vertex and Gemini? Don’t care.
As I write this, I bet a startup could be launched just offering this as a wrapper. This is surprisingly painful!
Thanks again for all the work; looking forward to seeing more out of Gemini.
Well, originally what was wrong was that non-vertex customers got much lower limits and about twice the time to first token as vertex customers. So I used a vertex key setup. However, the cli had me in auth hell trying to connect up with vertex. Like literal spinning. So, thank you. I wiped my vertex environment variables and upped my gemini key level, and it mostly works now.
It's very hard to figure out what resource is incurring charges – and get to a page where you can press "Cancel" on that resource – from the Billing Page. I had to open a support ticket to shut down my Cloud Workstation because I simply couldn't find it in the labyrinth. I gave up and deleted my project.
I will say as someone who uses GCP as an enterprise user and AI Studio in personal work, I was also confused about what Google AI Studio actually was at first. I was trying to set up a fork of Open NotebookLM and I just blindly followed Cursor’s guidance on how to get a GOOGLE_API_KEY to run text embedding API calls. Seems that it just created a new project under my personal GCP account, but without billing set up. I think I’ve been successfully getting responses without billing but I don’t know when that will run out.. suppose I’ll get some kind of error response if that happens..
I think I get why AI Studio exists, seems it enables people to prototype AI apps while hiding the complexity of the GCP console, despite the fact that (I assume) most AI Studio api calls are routed through Vertex in some way. Maybe it’s just confusing precisely because I’ve used GCP before.
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.
less expensive than what? You can use CC on the $20 plan. If you're using the maximum of your $20 subscription usage every 4 hours every day, the equivalent API cost would be at least hundreds per month
In addition to others mentioning subscriptions being better in Claude Code, i wanted to compare the two so i tried to find a Claude Max equivalent license... i have no clue how. In their blog post they mention `Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license` but they don't even link to it.. lol.
I think it is pretty clear that these $20/subs are loss leaders, and really only meant to get regular people to really start leaning on LLMs. Once they are hooked, we will see what the actual price of using so much compute is. I would imagine right now they are pricing their APIs either at cost or slightly below.
When using a single terminal Pro is good enough (even with a medium-large code base). When I started working with two terminals at two different issues at the same time, i’m reaching the credit limit.
I'm sure that there are power users who are using much more than $20 worth of compute, but there will also be many users who pay but barely use the service.
I would've thought "most" people would be firmly on the free tier, are there any stats to check how common it is? Personally I've had Gmail for 20 years, Android phones for 13 years, Home/chromecast devices but never thought about paying for Google One or any other services.
Sam Altman said they use about same amount of power as an oven. So at $0.2/kWh thats about 100kWh/4kW=25 hours of compute or a little over an hour every workday.
This is down voted I guess because the circumstances have changed - but boy is it still confusing. All these platforms have chat subscriptions, api pay-as-you-go, CLI subscriptions like "claude code" ... built-in offers via Github enterprise or Google Workspace enterprise ...
It's a frigg'n mess. Everyone at our little startup has spent time trying to understand what the actual offerings are; what the current set of entitlements are for different products; and what API keys might be tied to what entitlements.
I'm with __MatrixMan__ -- it's super confusing and needs some serious improvements in clarity.
Isn't that a bit like saying that gasoline should be sold as a fixed price subscription rather than a usage based scheme where long distance truckers pay more than someone driving < 100 miles per week?
A ChatBot is more like a fixed-price buffet where usage is ultimately human limited (even if the modest eaters are still subsidizing the hogs). An agentic system is going to consume resources in much more variable manner, depending on how it is being used.
> Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them
Obviously these companies want you to increase the amount of their product you consume, but it seems odd to call that a jerk move! FWIW, Anthropic's stated motivation for Claude Code (which Gemini is now copying) was be agnostic to your choice of development tools since CLI access is pretty much ubiquitous, even inside IDEs. Whether it's the CLI-based design, the underlying model, or the specifics of what Claude Code is capable of, they seem to have got something right, and apparently usage internal to Anthropic skyrocketed just based on word of mouth.
Claude desktop editing files and running commands via the desktop commander MCP is pretty much equivalent functionality wise to Claude Code. I can set both of them to go, make tea, and come back to see that they're still cranking after modifying several files and running several commands.
These companies are all for-profit, regardless of what altruistic intent they are trying to spin. Free tier usage and fixed price buffets are obviously not where the profit is, so it's hard to blame them for usage-based pricing for their premium products targeting mass adoption.
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.
I wouldn't dream of thinking anyone has anything "locked up". Certainly not OpenAI which increasingly seems to be on an uphill battle against competitors (including Microsoft who even though they're a partner, are also a competitor) who have other inroads.
Not sure what you mean by "full access", as none of the providers offer unrestricted usage. Pro gets you 2.5 Pro with usage limits. Ultra gets you higher limits + deep think (edit: accidentally put research when I meant think where it spends more resources on an answer) + much more Veo 3 usage. And of course you can use the API usage-billed model.
In the enterprise space, Microsoft’s pain is OpenAI’s gain. They are kicking butt.
In enterprises, Microsoft’s value proposition is that you’re leveraging all of the controls that you already have! Except… who is happy with the state of SharePoint governance?
You don’t have to be happy with it. If Microsoft already has all your data it’s much easier to trust them for AI than to add another entity into the equation, especially OpenAI.
> Google is fumbling the bag so badly with the pricing.
In certain areas, perhaps, but Google Workspace at $14/month not only gives you Gemini Pro, but 2 TB of storage, full privacy, email with a custom domain, and whatever else. College students get the AI pro plan for free. I recently looked over all the options for folks like me and my family. Google is obviously the right choice, and it's not particularly close.
And yet there were still some AI features that were unavailable to workspace users for a few months and you had to use a personal account. I think it's mostly fixed now but that was quite annoying since it was their main AI product (Gemini Studio or whatever, I don't remember for sure)
I know they raised the price on our Google Workspace Standard subscriptions but don't really know what we got for that aside from Gemini integration into Google Drive etc. Does this mean I can use Gemini CLI using my Workspace entitlement? Do I get Code Assist or anything like that? (But Code Assist seems to be free on a personal G account...?)
Google is fumbling with the marketing/communication - when I look at their stuff I am unclear on what is even available and what I already have, so I can't form an opinion about the price!
> Does this mean I can use Gemini CLI using my Workspace entitlement?
No, you cannot use neither Gemini CLI nor Code Assist via Workspace — at least not at the moment. However, if you upgrade your Workspace plan, you can use Gemini Advanced via the Web or app interfaces.
Workspace users with the Business Standard plan have access to Gemini Advanced, which is Google’s AI offering via the Web interface and mobile apps. This does not include API usage, AI Studio, Gemini CLI, etc. — all of which are of course available, but must be paid separately or used in the free tier.
In the case of Gemini CLI, it seems Google does not even support Workspace accounts in the free tier. If you want to use Gemini CLI as a Workspace customer, you must pay separately for it via API billing (pay-as-you-go). Otherwise, the alternative is to login with a personal (non-Workspace) account and use the free tier.
Well, now I'm a mixture of disappointed and confused
I was wondering what Gemini Advanced is. I don't see any mention of a Gemini Advanced here, but there is a Gemini Pro and a Gemini Ultra: https://gemini.google/subscriptions/
I had gotten the impression that Workspace might entitle us to some API credits or something based on section 3A here where they describe how to authenticate with the API via your Workspace account https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c... . That document does explicitly mention "Gemini Code Assist for Workspace" but I think I saw another website from Google agreeing with you and saying you can't use it with a Workspace account currently.
Yeah, this is all a mess. Time to go back to bed for six months and just continue using whatever my corporate overlords have already handed to me
From what I can tell, that was a bug and it has been fixed. I regularly use data with much more than 32k tokens in Gemini with my Workspace account, and context window issues are not a thing anymore.
What does set Gemini via Workspace apart from other offerings like AI Studio is the nerfed output limit and safety filters. Also, I never got Gemini to ground replies in Google search, except when in Deep Research, or to execute code. Finally, Workspace users of Gemini either cannot keep their chat history, or have to keep the entire history for a predetermined period (deleting individual chats is not allowed).
I'm a workspace subscriber, I get 4-5 questions on Gemini Pro (via gemini.google.com ) before it tells me I'm out of quota and have to switch to flash.
(Update: Oh.. I'm only on business starter, I should be on business standard. need more business!)
Absolutely no offense but why do you (and a lot of people here) believe Google paid products gives you any privacy ?
I’m pretty sure even if they wanted to respect privacy of a subset of their users, they must have so much legacy code and data everywhere that they couldn’t even do it if they wanted to. And I’m not sure they’d want it anyway.
They're 'fumbling' because these models are extremely expensive to run. It's also why there's so many products and so much confusion across the whole industry.
An interesting thing is that Google AI offers are much more confusing than the OpenAI ones — despite the fact that ChatGPT models have one of the worst naming schemes in the industry. Google has confusing model names, plans, API tiers, and even interfaces (AI Studio, Gemini app, Gemini Web, Gemini API, Vertex, Google Cloud, Code Assist, etc.). More often than not, these things overlap with one another, ensuring minimal clarity and preventing widespread usage of Google’s models.
It's the second time I read this in this thread. May I ask why you think this is the case? And in which domains? I am very satisfied with 2.5 pro when it comes to philosophical/literary analysis, probably because of the super long context I can fill with whole books, and wanted to try Claude Code for the same purpose, but with folders, summaries, etc to make up for the shorter context length.
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.
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)
Copilot is stating the plans for its own services are confusing. Summarizing it as "regurgitation of an LLM" doesn't adequately capture the purpose of the post.
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.
> The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One
It's not in Basic, Standard or Premium.
It's in a new tier called "Google AI Pro" which I think is worth inclusion in your catalogue of product confusion.
Oh wait, there's even more tiers that for some reason can't be paid for annually. Weird... why not? "Google AI Ultra" and some others just called Premium again but now include AI. 9 tiers, 5 called Premium, 2 with AI in the name but 6 that include Gemini. What a mess.
Yes this is a well-known trope in HN about promotion-oriented launches, but this is just pure lack of proper messaging. I had a chat with one of Google's representatives, and they keep on saying "they do not have any information on this as of now".
This is less about internal systems and more about either incompetence or active sabotage.
It gets even more confusing! If you're on the "Premium" plans (i.e the the old standard "Google One" plans) and upgrade to >=5TB storage, your "Premium" plan starts including all the features of "Google AI Pro".
Tip: If you do annual billing for "Premium (5 TB)", you end up paying $21/month for 5TB of storage and the same AI features of "Google AI pro (2TB)"; which is only $1/month more than doing "Google AI Pro (2 TB)" (which only has monthly billing)
It's interesting to see the most recent internet archive snapshot from last week. Just 4 tiers. Basic, Standard, Premium which don't include Gemini. There is a fourth tier called "AI Premium" that does.
I subscribed to Google One through the Google Photos iOS app because I wanted photos I took on my iPhone to be backed up to Google. When I switched to Android and went into Google One to increase my storage capacity in my Google account, I found that it was literally impossible, because the subscription was tied to my iCloud account. I even got on a line with Google Support about it and they told me yeah it's not even possible on their side to disconnect my Google One subscription from Apple. I had to wait for the iCloud subscription to Google One to end, and then I was able to go into Google One and increase my storage capacity.
The root problem here lies with Apple. It's so frustrating how they take a 30% cut for the privilege of being unable to actually have a relationship with your customers. Want to do a partial refund (or a refund at all)? Want to give one month free to an existing subscriber? Tough luck. Your users are Apple's customers, not yours.
I implemented Google One integration in an iOS app. This comment chain is accurate. Users want to pay with Apple (like other app subscriptions) but then your “account” is inside their payments world. Which is super confusing since users (rightly) think they are dealing with their Google account.
Sounds like the analysts and product owners didn't really want to solve this problem. Instead they ticked the boxes, got the bonuses, and the devs never questioned it and just implemented it for fear of being PIPed.
I'm sure there is technically nothing that stopped you from treating this "Pay with Apple" thing as just another payment method inside the google account, except maybe additional complexity and red-tape.
Seen this many times when PMs, POs, and Devs code by features instead of trying to actually solve something. I don't even want to know what mess of a database schema is behind this monstrosity.
> Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.
Enabling this like Ticketmaster enables selling tickets.
In ticketmaster's case I believe they give kickbacks and lucrative exclusive contracts with large venues, to squeeze smaller ones, maybe making whole tours use it but only kicking back to the biggest or select venues on the tour I think.
Apple sometimes does special deals and special rules with important providers, among many other tactics behind their moat. All single signons must also offer apple single sign-on, for instance, and they have even disabled access to customer accounts using their single sign-on for unrelated business disputes, though they walked it back in the big public example I'm aware of, the threat is there if you go against them in any way.
Ticketmaster is in no way comparable, because they gouge customers and provide no protections.
Someone in the music industry explained that both bands and venues like Ticketmaster because then Ticketmaster is the "bad guy" and the band can just shrug their shoulders and pretend to be the victim while profiting enormously from Ticketmaster's evil practices.
Okay, all the app developers pull out of iOS because they're not actually useful, in fact they should be paying Apple!
How many people do you think would still buy iPhones if there are 0 apps on the app store? Lmaooo, it's almost like it's a co-operative relationship and Apple don't deserve a huge cut because it's the apps that sell their phones.
The problem is that other payment processors could emerge with the same trust profiles as Apple to facilitate this transaction.
I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.
Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.
This is exactly the kind of innovation Apple apologists don't realize they're missing out on in the walled garden. You could still have easy, centralized billing with all-in-one management and one-click cancellation, while paying 30% less for everything. Give the free market a chance.
You can't say a slave is free because their master is free to enslave them, and they're free to escape if they can. Sometimes you need rules to create real freedom.
Why do you think that's the only way? Payment processors have long been able to differentiate recurring transactions from one-offs. Capital One has subscription management.
How the platform and the vendor split that money is irrelevant to me, and I’m not convinced this would become cheaper - evidently consumers are willing to pay the current price, so why wouldn’t the vendor just increase their profit?
In the same vein: Games don’t cost less on the epic store despite their lower (compared to Steam) either, so as an end user it makes no difference where I buy games.
Maybe you like paying an extra 20%. That's your business. But fees like that affect the viability of lots of business ideas, including games. Having lower fees increases the pool of indie games.
Yeah, technically. But just everyone _normal_ just pays using Stripe often without even knowing about it. On the _walled garden_ all is so clear that my 70 years aunt is able to do it. And there is no exceptions to the rule: every subscription made through the App Store is there and it's cancellable...
30% is a robbery, and the confusion on the customer "ownership" is true, but it's not useful for the discussion to negate the advantage the _garden_ offers to the basic consumer
At least on my side, thats fine / intended. As long as their is no useable regulations around unsub dark patterns, that type of firewall is what I want as a customer.
I bought my Google Photos subscription through the iOS app because it was cheaper than through Google directly. I have no idea why, but it was when I compared prices.
There is a vscode extension that can basically be an agent but use gemini from the website which is cool.
But I found it to a little bit clunky and I guess I like the ui of google, I mean, the point is to get the point across. If you really hate the gemini ui, I am pretty sure that there is stylus extension which can beautify it or change the styles to your looking.
I guess I am an android user but still I understand your icloud subscription but if you're only choice as to why to not switch to google is passwords (but maybe you can mention more?), then for passwords, please try bitwarden, I found it to be really delightful.
The main reason not to migrate is that they cost the same, but I get more value from iCloud. You can probably say the same for Google One on Android; ecosystem retention seems to work well for Apple and Google.
I used 1Password in the past, and it’s possible to reconfigure most things to use another provider (passwords, app storage, etc.). AFAIK, you cannot reconfigure the full phone backup, which you must manually do without an iCloud storage quota. But why switch providers if I’m on the Apple ecosystem and the service is priced at the same price tiers? (I also use “Hide My Email” occasionally)
The only difference will be Gemini. However, my most significant percentage of AI usage is currently on desktops. The free tier of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude is okay for use on mobile.
The UI part that I mentioned is this:
Gemini is just a web app, which means that if you need to use AI from the selected text or the app you are using, you need to copy and paste or capture a screenshot. But ChatGPT macOS integration is much better. It’s a native app that you can summon with a key combination, and it can automatically put the active app/text in context.
I evaluated multiple options, and in the end, the winner for me was Raycast AI, because their app UX is incredible, and you can integrate your prompt with existing tools very easily. With prompts like: “For each item in the current selection, add a todo in @Apple Reminders”, or things like “Use @firecrawl to scrap the current page, then create a table with all the product prices and use @finder to store a CSV file”. You can save the prompt in a preset and use it as a Raycast command. That UX change was like night and day regarding daily AI usage. I chose to pay for the Raycast subscription, even if it was more expensive than switching everything from iCloud to Google and paying for only one service.
My point in the parent post is that today, Google is the company most well-positioned to be the absolute leader of the AI space. However, unlike OpenAI, they don’t seem to care much about the UX (at least outside Android), but if you use the assistant to work every day, the difference a good chat UX does is huge.
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 think Pro is for regular folks, not specifically for programmers.
I also have a pro subscription and wish I could get an API key with that with generous quota as well but pro is just for "consumers" using Gemini app I guess
The other day I was trying to figure out a cost estimate for Gemini 2.5 Pro but they don't have this in their pricing calculator - it just isn't there. Only endless tables with various model sizes and options which aren't explained.
How can I subscribe to this? From the comments here it sounds like it's NOT bundled into the Gemini Pro subscription, but into "Gemini Code Assist Standard".
I can't find any way to upgrade to a paid plan, is this even possible for individuals, or is it just "free or enterprise"?
/Edit: Okay I went through the Gemini docs. I found that in Google Cloud you can enable Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise for the account
Google does not care about users at all, ZERO, it is full of people are so fond of technology, they try something and soon move on to something else. I am using Google Cloud for work, and previously Google Mail , Google Map, and YouTube user, zero good experience.
I was having such a good time using Gemini 2.5 Pro I forgot that Google is generally incapable of sustaining a new product. I’ll try not to get used too attached to it.
Ugh, I really wish this had been written in Go or Rust. Just something that produces a single binary executable and doesn't require you to install a runtime like Node.
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!
From my perspective, I'm totally happy to use pnpm to install and manage this. Even if it were a native tool, NPM might be a decent distribution mechanism (see e.g. esbuild).
Obviously everybody's requirements differ, but Node seems like a pretty reasonable platform for this.
As a longtime user of NPM but overall fan of JS and TS and even its runtimes, NPM is a dumpster fire and forcing end users to use it is brittle, lazy, and hostile. A small set of dependencies will easily result in thousands (if not tens of thousands) of transitive dependency files being installed.
If you have to run end point protection that will blast your CPU with load and it makes moving or even deleting that folder needlessly slow. It also makes the hosting burden of NPM (nusers) who must all install dependencies instead of (nCI instances), which isn't very nice to our hosts. Dealing with that once during your build phase and then packaging that mess up is the nicer way to go about distributing things depending on NPM to end users.
I ran the npm install command in their readme, it took a few seconds, then it worked. Subsequent runs don't have to redownload stuff. It's 127MB, which is big for an executable but not a real problem. Where is the painful part?
I was going to say the same thing, but they couldn’t resist turning the project into a mess of build scripts that hop around all over the place manually executing node.
I guess it needs to start various processes for the MCP servers and whatnot? Just spawning another Node is the easy way to do that, but a bit annoying, yeah.
It depends a lot on what the executable does. I don’t know the hello world size, but anecdotally I remember seeing several go binaries in the single digit megabyte range. I know the code size is somewhat larger than one might expect because go keeps some type info around for reflection whether you use it or not.
The Golang runtime is big enough by itself that it makes a real difference from some WASM applications, and people are using Rust instead purely because of that.
That is point not a line. An extra 2MB of source is probably a 60MB executable, as you are measuring the runtime size. Two "hello worlds" are 116MB? Who measures executables in Megabits?
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.
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.
I feel like Cargo or Go Modules can absolutely do the same thing as the mess of build scripts they have in this repo perfectly well and arguably better.
You don't have to believe me if you don't want to. But I strongly advise everyone who still uses prettier to try a formatter written in Rust, for example dprint. It's a world of difference.
Unless you build self-updating in, which Google certainly has experience in, in part to avoid clients lagging behind. Because aside from being a hindrance (refusing to start and telling the client to update) there's no way you can actually force them to run an upgrade command.
How so? Doesn’t it also make updates pretty easy? Have the precompiled binary know how to download the new version. Sure there are considerations for backing up the old version, but it’s not much work, and frees you up from being tied to one specific ecosystem
That's not an argument against the difficulty of "updating a binary file" vs "updating via pip", it's merely addressing what your work deems important and possible.
(Aside from the fact that allowing "use pip" completely defeats the purpose of any other of these mechanisms, so it's a poster-child example of security-theater)
It’s a standalone binary. It doesn’t require anything at all. It’s literally just one file you can put anywhere you like. It doesn’t need a third-party package manager.
> A single, pre-compiled binary is convenient for the user's first install only.
Its not.
Its convenient for CIs, for deployment, for packaging, for running multiple versions. It's extremely simple to update (just replace the binary with another one).
Now, e.g. "just replacing one file with another" may not have convenience commands like "npm update". But its not hard.
My point is that a pre-compiled binary is extremely more convenient for *everyone involved in the delivery pipeline* including the end-user. Especially for delivering updates.
As someone who's packaged Javascript(node), Ruby, Go and rust tools in .debs, snap, rpms: packaging against a dynamic runtime (node, ruby, rvm etc) is a giant PIAS that will break on a significant amount of users' machines, and will probably break on everyones machine at some point. Whereas packaging that binary is as simple as it can get: most such packages need only one dependency that everyone and his dog already has: libc.
> My point is that a pre-compiled binary is extremely more convenient for everyone involved in the delivery pipeline* including the end-user. Especially for delivering updates.*
The easiest is running "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade" and have my whole system updated. Instead of writing some script to get it done from some github's releases page and hoping that it's not hijacked.
Having a sensible project is what make it easy down the line (including not depending on gnu libc if not needed as some people uses musl). And I believe it's easy to setup a repository if your code is proprietary (Just need to support the most likely distribution, like ubuntu, fedora, suse's tumbleweed,...)
Just `wget -O ~/.local/bin/gemini-cli https://ci.example.com/assets/latest/gemini-cli` (Or the CURL version thereof)
It can pick the file off github, some CI's assets, a package repo, a simple FTP server, an HTTP fileserver, over SSH, from a local cache, etc. It's so simple that one doesn't need a package manager. So there commonly is no package manager.
Yet in this tread people are complaining that "a single binary" is hard to manage/update/install because there's no package manager to do that with. It's not there, because the manage/update/install is so simple, that you don't need a package manager!
> is so simple, that you don't need a package manager!
You might not know the reason ppl use package managers. Installing this "simple" way make it quite difficult to update and remove compared to using package managers. And although they are also "simple", it's quite a mess to manage packages manually in place of using such battle-tested systems
> You might not know the reason ppl use package managers.
People use package managers for the following:
- to manage dependencies
- to update stuff to a specific version or the latest version
- to downgrade stuff
- to install stuff
- to remove stuff
any of these, except for the dependency management, are a single command, or easy to do manually, with a single compiled binary. They are so simple that they can easily be built into the tool. Or handled by your OSs package manager. Or with a "shell script" that the vendor can provide (instead of, or next to, the precompiled binary.
I did not say manually, you infer that. But I never meant that. The contrary: because it's so simple, automating that, or have your distro, OS or package manager do this for you, is trivial. As opposed to that awful "curl example.com/install.sh | sudo tee -" or those horrible built-in updaters (that always start nagging when I open the app - the one moment that I don't want to be bothered by updates because I need the app now)
The only reason one would then need a package manager is to manage dependencies. But a precompiled binary like Go's or Rusts typically are statically compiled so they have no (or at most one) dependency.
Imagine the ease of a single ".targz" or so that includes the correct python version, all pips, all ENV vars, config files, and is executable. If you distribute that - what do you still need pip for? If you distribute that, how simple would turning it into a .deb, snap, dmg, flatpack, appimg, brew package, etc be? (Answer: a lot easier than doing this for the "directory of .py files. A LOT)
> Imagine the ease of a single ".targz" or so that includes the correct python version, all pips, all ENV vars, config files, and is executable. If you distribute that - what do you still need pip for?
pip is there so you don't need to do that. In the deployment world, you really want one version per system for everything and know that everything is in sync. To get that the solution was a distribution of software and a tool to manage them. We then extended that to programming language ecosystem and pip is part of the result.
But for workstation, a lot of people wants the latest, so the next solution was to be able to abstract the programming language ecosystem from the distribution (And you may not have a choice in the case of macOS), so what we get is directory-restricted interactions (go, npm,..) or doing shell magic so that the tooling think it's the system (virtual env,...).
It's a neat trick, but the only reason to do so is if you want to distribute compiled version of a software to customer. But if the user have access to the code, It's better to adapt the software to the system (repositories, flatpak...) or build a system around it (VM, containers, ...).
You'd think that, but a globally installed npm package is annoying to update, as you have to do it manually and I very rarely need to update other npm global packages so at least personally I always forget to do it.
I don't think that's the main reason. Just installed this and peaked in node_nodules. There are a lot of random deps, probably for the various local capabilities, and it was probably easier to find those libs in the Node ecosystem than elsewhere.
Also, react-reconciler caught my eye. Apparently that's a dependency of ink, which lets you write text-based UIs in React.
The question is whether what makes it useful is actually being in the terminal (limited, glitchy, awkward interaction) or whether it's being able to run next to files on a remote system. I suspect the latter.
Eh, I can't see how your comment is relevant ti the parent thread. Creating a CLI in Go is barely more complicated than JS. Rust, probably, but people aren't asking for that.
They wrote the CLI "GUI" in React using ink, which is all JS-only. I don't know what the Golang way of doing this would be, but maybe it's harder if you want the same result.
There are many GUI building libraries in Go. Sure, you wouldn't be writing JSX (and I agree it's an interesting idea), but it doesn't mean it's more any work to get things rendered in a terminal with other approaches, especially with these AI assistants to help you finish the boring parts.
If the UI is complicated at all, React is a well-established way to do that easily. The one-off tools will be harder, and even the AI won't know them as well as it knows React.
Language choice is orthogonal to distribution strategy. You can make single-file builds of JavaScript (or Python or anything) programs! It's just a matter of packaging, and there are packaging solutions for both Bun and Node. Don't blame the technology for people choosing not to use it.
I really don't mind either way. My extremely limited experience with Node indicates they have installation, packaging and isolation polished very well.
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.
I played around with it to automate GitHub tasks for me (tagging and sorting PRs and stuff). Sometimes it needs a little push to use the API instead of web search, but then it even installs the right tools (like gh) for you. https://youtu.be/LP1FtpIEan4
Hi - I work on this. Uptake is a steep curve right now, spare a thought for the TPUs today.
Appreciate all the takes so far, the team is reading this thread for feedback. Feel free to pile on with bugs or feature requests we'll all be reading.
I tried to get Gemini CLI to update itself using the MCP settings for Claude. It went off the rails. I then fed it the link you provided and it correctly updates it's settings file. You might mention the settings.json file in the README.
The gemini doc for -p says "Prompt. Appended to input on stdin (if any)."
So it doesn't follow the doc.
gemini "Say hello"
Fails as it doesn't take any arguments.
For comparison, claude lets you pass the prompt as a positional argument, but it does append it to the prompt and then gives you a running session. That's what I'd want for my use-case.
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.
While I get my organization's IT department involved, I do wonder why this is built in a way that requires more work for people already paying google money than a free user.
I'd echo that having to get the IT section involved to create a google cloud project is not great UX when I have access to NotebookLM Pro and Gemini for Workplace already.
Also this doco says GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID but the actual tool wants GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT
I believe Workspace users have to pay a separate subscription to use the Gemini CLI, the so-called “Gemini for Google Cloud”, which starts at an additional 19 dollars per month [^1]. If that’s really the case, it’s very disappointing to me. I expected access to Gemini CLI to be included in the normal Workspace subscription.
I can imagine. Y'all didn't start simple like some of your competitors; 'intrapraneurial' efforts in existing contexts like yours come with well-documented struggles. Good work!
Thanks for your clarification. I've been able to set up Gemini CLI with my Workspace account.
Just a heads-up: your docs about authentication on Github say to place a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID as an environment variable. However, what the Gemini CLI is actually looking for, from what I can tell, is a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT environment variable with the name of a project (rather than its ID). You might want to fix that discrepancy between code and docs, because it might confuse other users as well.
I don’t know what constraints made you all require a project ID or name to use the Gemini CLI with Workspace accounts. However, it would be far easier if this requirement were eliminated.
sorry, I was wrong about free tier - I've edited above. this is WIP.
noted on documentation, there's a PR in flight on this. also found some confusion around gmail users who are part of the developer program hitting issues.
> free tier for Workspace isn't yet supported. sorry. you need to set the project and pay.
Well, I've just set up Gemini CLI with a Workspace account project in the free tier, and it works apparently for free. Can you explain whether billing for that has simply not been configured yet, or where exactly billing details can be found?
> noted on documentation, there's a PR in flight on this. also found some confusion around gmail users who are part of the developer program hitting issues.
How about a binary - either you subscribe to Gemini or you don't. Rate limits or gates for higher tier models/capabilities, that you can upgrade to unlock. Think Small/Medium/Large. Anything more complicated than this is immensely annoying to both consumers and enterprise customers. For power users/nonconformists, include a pay as you go option using credits or cost per action that has access to all capabilities out of the box.
Having played with the gemini-cli here for 30 minutes, so I have no idea but best guess: I believe that if you auth with a Workspace account it routes all the requests through the GCP Vertex API, which is why it needs a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT env set, and that also means usage-based billing. I don't think it will leverage any subscriptions the workspace account might have (are there still gemini subscriptions for workspace? I have no idea. I thought they just raised everyone's bill and bundled it in by default. What's Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise? I have no idea).
> First google forced me to start paying for my email domain.
Do you mean that they stopped offering the legacy free tier and you had to upgrade to a paid plan? If that's the case, they reverted their decision and it was possible to go back to the free tier. I don't know if it is still possible, as this was 3 years ago, but here's a thread outlining how to do it. https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/urky...
It probably is more powerful though. I know the $30 copilot M365 from microsoft is way better than what they offer to consumers for free. I don't have a google account so I didn't check that.
We started using Gemini CLI to build itself after about week two. If I had to guess, I'd say better than 80% of the code was written with Gemini CLI. Honestly, once we started using the CLI, we started experimenting a lot more and building waaaaay faster.
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.
FWIW the fair comparison for Gemini 2.5 Pro would be o4-mini. That being said I’ve also found that Gemini is way better at getting it right on the first or second try and responding to corrections.
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.
The reason is that billing is separate, via the paid tier of the API. Just a few minutes ago, I was able to test Gemini CLI using a Workspace account after setting up a project in the free tier of the API. However, that seems to have been a bug on their end, because I now get 403 errors (Forbidden) with that configuration. The remaining options are either to set up billing for the API or use a non-Workspace Google account.
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
Both allow you to switch between models, send short prompts from a CLI, optionally attach some context. I prefer mods because it's an easier install and I never need to worry about Python envs and other insanity.
If you uv install llm
Then grab my shelllm scripts github.com/irthomasthomas/shelllm and source them in your terminal then you can use premade prompt functions like shelp "what's a nm and grep command to find this symbol in these 3 folders" -m gemini-pro
There's also wrappers that place the command directly in your terminal prompt if you run shelp-c
Is it really that confusing? Gemini is the equivalent of ChatGPT; AI Studio is for advanced users that want to control e.g. temperature; Vertex AI is the GCP integrated API; Notebook LLM is basically personal RAG; and Jules is a developer agent.
Vertex AI also has an AI studio. All of these products also have rag like abilities. You can add documents to Gemini and ask it questions. When would an end user switch to notebooks to do this?
And not that there isn’t a level of knowledge you can gain to answer these questions, it’s just not clear.
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.
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).
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.
Super weird! I've been using it the last week, and never hit the quota limit for free users. We're having some capacity issues right now, but that should not affect the quota. Would love it if you can try tomorrow or so again!
It's happening to me with API Key usage. I assume there are no Terms of Use protections on our data unless we access Gemini CLI in a paid manner?
[API Error: {"error":{"message":"{\n \"error\": {\n \"code\": 429,\n \"message\": \"Resource has been exhausted (e.g. check quota).\",\n
\"status\": \"RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED\"\n }\n}\n","code":429,"status":"Too Many Requests"}}]
Please wait and try again later. To increase your limits, request a quota increase through AI Studio, or switch to another /auth method
However, in the Google cloud console I don't see any of the quotas going above their default limits.
Yeah this exact thing is happening to me also. Minutes of runtime and only errors. I guess I’ll try again later? I have billing up and I’m Tier 1. Wouldn’t expect to hit limits like this on the first prompt.
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.
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.
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?
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!!
Thanks so much for this! I’d really appreciate a more consumer oriented subscription offering, similar to Claude Max, that combines Gemini CLI (with IP compliance) and the Gemini app (extra points for API access too!).
Hey the interface on YouTube loads super slowly for me. The change appeared a few months ago. I'm not talking about the video streams, but the ajax loading of the UI. Whether it's opening a new youtube tab or navigating between videos within youtube, it takes forever. Chrome/Safari -> same deal, 30 seconds delays is what I observe. My macbook pro is 10 years old, the problem doesn't appear on more recent hardware, but still youtube shouldn't be the slowest website to load on my machine. I can load spotify.com just fine in about 5 seconds.
Please, for the love of God, stop your models always answering with essays or littering code with tutorial style comments. Almost every task devolves into "now get rid of the comments". It seems impossible to prevent this.
And thinking is stupid. "Show me how to generate a random number in python"... 15s later you get an answer.
No. We're not talking a few useful comments, but verbosity where typically the number of comments exceeds the actual code written. It must think we're all stupid or it's documenting a tutorial. Telling it not to has no effect.
Maybe you hit a specific use case where the LLM part turns into its roots?
I had a somehos similar problem with Claude 3.7, where I had a class named "Workflow" and it got nuts, producing code/comments I didn't ask for, all related to some "workflow" that it tried to replicate and not my code, it was strange.
Take some time to understand how the technology works, and how you can configure it yourself when it comes to thinking budget. None of these problems sound familiar to me as a frequent user of LLMs.
Hello, thanks for the work for finally having an analog to Claude Code.
A natural question to ask is, if in the near future, can Google One "Google AI Pro" subscribers have higher limits than what is offered for free users?
The thing that had me close it and go back to Claude Code immediately was how often Gemini CLI failed to make file changes. This doesn’t instill confidence at all, with it retrying edits multiple times - who knows what it ends up editing, then.
CC has this issue too, but way less often, and second shot almost always works.
- Here [1] it says "Project settings override user settings." How does gemini determine if we're in a project? Does it look for a `.gemini` folder in the current working directory as well as every parent directory up to the root? Would Gemini be able to read the contents of a subfolder of the CWD if the subfolder contains a different `.gemini` folder?
- I don't see documentation for the `selectedAuthType` field in the documentation for settings.json. Mine says `oauth-personal`. I could've sworn I signed in with my Google Workspace account. Does `oauth-personal` apply to Workspace accounts?
And a feature request: it would be nice to add a restriction in the settings.json file forcing anybody who uses gemini in that project to sign in to a Workspace account in a specific org (or use a specific project, I guess).
Is LiteLLM integration on the roadmap? I get that part of the motivation to build this is to funnel usage to Google models, but it would be nice to be able to go through OpenRouter and/or use local models too. Open source is nice, but open model configuration would be nicer :)
Thanks for building this! The tool shows a lot of promise. Coming from Claude Code, the core functionality
feels solid - just needs some permission refinements to match enterprise use cases. This is based upon quickly skimming the current code.
High ROI feature requests:
• Pattern-based permissions - Bash(git:) to allow git but not rm, Write(logs/.txt) for path scoping
• Allow/deny precedence rules - explicit deny should override general allow (security principle)
• Config file hierarchy - system → user → project precedence for policy enforcement
Medium ROI improvements:
• Command argument filtering - whitelist git commit but not git --exec-path=/bin/sh
• Multiple config formats - support both simple arrays and structured permission objects
• Runtime permission diagnostics - gemini permissions list to debug what's actually enabled
• Environment variable injection - top-level env config for OTEL endpoints, API keys, etc.
The permission engine is really the key piece - once you can express "allow X but not Y within X", it unlocks
most advanced use cases. Keep up the great work!
On the one hand, yes this has obviously high immediate value; on the other hand, I can't help but feel like you are giving access to multiple tools that can be used for arbitrary code execution anyway (i.e. running tests, installing dependencies, or running any linter that has a plugin system...), so blacklisting `git --exec-path=/bin/sh` for example is... Misguided? You would have a better time containing the agent in an environment without internet access?
It’s not misguided. The goal isn’t prefect security, the goal is mitigating risk and collaborating with cross functional security, compliance, platform, operations, etc… teams.
Use Jules, also by Google if you need what you describe.
One thing I'd really like to see in coding agents is this: As an architect, I want to formally define module boundaries in my software, in order to have AI agents adhere to and profit from my modular architecture.
Even with 1M context, for large projects, it makes sense to define boundaries These will typically be present in some form, but they are not available precisely to the coding agent. Imagine there was a simple YAML format where I could specify modules and where they can be found in the source tree, and the APIs of other modules it interacts with. Then it would be trivial to turn this into a context that would very often fit into 1M tokens. When an agent decides something needs to be done in the context of a specific module, it could then create a new context window containing exactly that module, effetively turning a large codebase into a small codebase, for which Gemini is extraordinarily effective.
There is one feature in Claude Code which is often overlooked and I haven't seen it in any of the other agentic tools: There is a tool called "sub-agent", which creates a fresh context windows in which the model can independently work on a clearly defined sub-task. This effectively turns Claude Code from a single-agent model to a hierarchical multi-agent model (I am not sure if the hierarchy goes to depths >2).
I wonder if it is a concious decision not to include this (I imagine it opens a lot of possibilities of going crazy, but it also seems to be the source of a great amount of Claud Code's power). I would very much like to play with this if it appears in gemini-cli
Next step would be the possibility to define custom prompts, toolsets and contexts for specific re-occuring tasks, and these appearing as tools to the main agent. Example for such a thing: create_new_page. The prompt could describe the steps one needs to create the page. Then the main agent could simply delegate this as a well-defined task, without cluttering its own context with the operational details.
Possibly. One could think about hooking this in as a tool or simple shell command. But then there is no management when multiple tools modify the codebase simultaneously.
But it is still worth a try and may be possible with some prompting and duct tape.
Could Gemini CLI be used for PR reviews? For example, would you expect that asking Gemini to compare two git commit hashes and analyze the code changes for potential bugs/conciseness/adhesion to the idiomatic project style, etc. to work well?
Edit: I tried it. The setup was a breeze. I fed the CLI two git commit IDs and some light prompting on what to look for. It gave a reasonable response. I'll try on a real PR shortly.
Overall it looks and feels good. I gave it a problem, like, what was it... to update website pages to use single layout, it wasn't trivial but it wasn't that hard. It burned through 7M tokens and like 20-25mins didn't accomplished it. I stopped it because I didn't want to waste more resources.
I think with better prompting on my end, as I have good experience with Gemini, this will be awesome. You probably could tweak a lot on your end as well, don't let it get stuck in cycles.
This sounds like it's practically unlimited and free? A bit like GMail. It is comes to close to Claude Code they may overtake them and dominate the market simply with their tried and true "give it away for free forever with practially no limits" strategy. I pay 20$ for Claude Code, which is nothing in relation to the value it provides, but obviously a 0$ price point will get you a bigger piece of the Pie. Big Oof for Anthropic. Kinda lame that they can just copy a new and innovative company and undersell at a price point of 0$. Not that I'm cheering for Anthropic either; I'd much rather own my sillicon.
"Failed to login. Ensure your Google account is not a Workspace account."
Is your vision with Gemini CLI to be geared only towards non-commercial users? I have had a workspace account since GSuite and have been constantly punished for it by Google offerings all I wanted was gmail with a custom domain and I've lost all my youtube data, all my fitbit data, I cant select different versions of some of your subscriptions (seemingly completely random across your services from a end-user perspective), and now as a Workspace account I cant use Gemini CLI for my work, which is software development. This approach strikes me as actively hostile towards your loyal paying users...
The barrier to use this project is maddening. I went through all of the setup instructions and getting the workspace error for a personal gmail account.
Googlers, we should not have to do all of this setup and prep work for a single account. Enterprise I get, but for a single user? This is insufferable.
What's up with printing lame jokes every few seconds? The last thing I want from a tool like this is my eye to be drawn to the window all the time as if something had changed and needs my action. (Having a spinner is fine, having changing variable length text isn't.)
Thanks, but where are those accessibility settings? /help shows nothing related to settings other than auth and theme, there's no related flags, and there's a ~/.gemini/settings.json that contains just the auth type.
Aside from being an opentelemetry maintainer who likes seeing these things ...
... it's a big deal because the only way to really make sense of using LLMs in any context is to have good observability data you can analyze later. And so the traces that they emit here will show all the CLI invocations, inputs/outputs and context for each chat turn in a session, and you can look for patterns that exhibit good or bad stuff.
You raise an interesting topic. Right now, when we think about privacy in the AI space, most of the discussion hinges on using our data for training purposes or not. That being said, I figure it won’t be long before AI companies use the data they collect to personalize ads as well.
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 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.
Just refactored 1000 lines of Claude Code generated to 500 lines with Gemini Pro 2.5 ! Very impressed by the overall agentic experience and model performance.
816 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadDefinitely not because of Claude Code eating our lunch!
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.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Both when chatting in text mode or when asking it to produce code.
The verbosity of the code is the worse. Comments often longer than the actual code, every nook and cranny of an algorithm unrolled over 100's of lines, most of which unnecessary.
Feels like typical code a mediocre Java developer would produce in the early 2000's
So, google's codebase
Sometimes I also yeet that file to Codex and see which implementation is better. Clear context, read that file again, give it a diff that codex produce and tell it do a review.
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.
If you don't think claude code is just miles ahead of other things you haven't been using it (or well)
I am certain they keep metrics on those "power users" (especially since they probably work there) and when everyone drops what they were using and moves to a specific tool that is something they should be careful of.
What are they supposed to do?
“Oh no, they’ve released CLI tool before us! It’s game over, we can’t do it too, we need to come up with something else now!”
better question is why do you need a modle specific CLI when you should be able to plug in to individual models.
Haven't used Jules or codex yet since I've been happy and am working on optimizing my current workflow
So yes with Claude Code you can grab the Max plan and not worry too much about usage. With Aider you'll be paying per API call, but it will cost quite a bit less than the similar work if using Claude Code in API-mode.
I concluded that – for me – Claude Code _may_ give me better results, but Aider will likely be cheaper than Claude Code in either API-mode or subscription-mode. Also I like that I really can fill up the aider context window if I want to, and I'm in control of that.
I'd be pretty surprised if that was the case - something like ~8 hours of Aider use against Claude can spend $20, which is how much Claude Pro costs.
You can think of Aider as being a semi-auto LLM process. First you ask it to do something. It goes through a generate -> reflect -> refine loop until it feels like it has achieved the goal you give it. Aider has a reflection limit so it'll only do this loop a limited number of times and then it will add/remove the code that it deems fit. Then it'll give you instructions to run. You can run those instructions (e.g. to actually run a script) and then append the results from the run into the context to get it to fix any issues, but this is optional. What you send in the context and what you ask the models to do are in your hands. This makes iteration slower and the LLM does less but it also can potentially keep costs lower depending on what you delegate to the LLM and how often you iterate with it.
Claude Code, Codex, and I suspect Gemini CLI on the other hand will autonomously run your code then use the output to continue refining its approach autonomously until the goal is reached. This can consume many more tokens, potentially, than hand guiding Aider, because its potential for iteration is so much longer. But Claude Code and the like also need a lot less direction to make progress. You can, for example, ask it to do a big refactor and then just leave to lunch and come back to see if the refactor is done. Aider will require babying the whole way.
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.
https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...
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.
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.
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
A more credible argument is security and privacy, but I couldn't care less if they're managing to be best in class using haiku
I have thrown very large codebases at this and it has been able to navigate and learn them effortlessly.
Not if you're in EU though. Even though I have zero or less AI use so far, I tinker with it. I'm more than happy to pay $200+tax for Max 20x. I'd be happy to pay same-ish for Gemini Pro.. if I knew how and where to have Gemini CLI like I do with Claude code. I have Google One. WHERE DO I SIGN UP, HOW DO I PAY AND USE IT GOOGLE? Only thing I have managed so far is through openrouter via API and credits which would amount to thousands a month if I were to use it as such, which I won't do.
What I do now is occasionally I go to AI Studio and use it for free.
I also just got the email for Gemini ultra and I couldn't even figure out what was being offered compared to pro outside of 30tb storage vs 2tb storage!
Never ascribe to AI, that which is capable of being borked by human PMs.
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/1427
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/...
Also they should make it clearer which SDKs, documents, pricing, SLAs etc apply to each. I still get confused when I google up some detail and end up reading the wrong document.
Unless you convince MS to let you at the "Provisioned Throughput" model. Which also requires being big enough for sales to listen to you.
Nahh, not really - Vertex has a HUGE feature surface, and can run a ton of models and frameworks. Gemini happens to be one of them, but you could also run non-google LLMs, non LLM stuff, run notebooks against your dataset, manage data flow and storage, and and and…
Gemini is “just” an LLM.
Vertex API is managed by Vertex team in Google Cloud. This is a production ready infrastructure that is SRE managed but usually one or two steps from the bleeding edge.
Gemini API, Jules etc are built by Google Labs. This is close to the bleeding edge but not as production ready.
It's easy, you just ask the best Google Model to create a script that outputs the number of API calls made to the Gemini API in a GCP account.
100% fail rate so far.
It's so insanely unintuitive.
"The Google Cloud Dashboard is a mess, and they haven't fixed it in years." Tell me what you want, and I'll do my best to make it happen.
In the interim, I would also suggest checking out Cloud Hub - https://console.cloud.google.com/cloud-hub/ - this is us really rethinking the level of abstraction to be higher than the base infrastructure. You can read more about the philosophy and approach here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-developme...
I’m a small time GCP customer for five or six years, and relatively tech competent, and I had a very difficult time getting Gemini code set up yesterday with Vertex API keys; finally I had to use gcloud to login from the CLI in combination with clicking a link and doing web sign on from Gemini. This frustrated me, not least because I have API direct calls to Vertex Gemini working from Aider, although I could not tell you exactly what incantation I finally used to make it work. In particular it didn’t look to me like the Gemini code app uses something like dotenv? I don’t recall now; upshot - could get it to tell me I was logged in wrong / had an oauth2 error / needed a project id at various times, but no inference.
What I wanted: to be able to go to a simple page tied to a google login and generate named API keys that can be used from anywhere to query Gemini models with a SINGLE key and environment variable kept in a .env file. I would prefer to pre-fill the account that debits by API usage. For an example, you could sign up for Anthropic API, OpenAI API, OpenRouter to see their customer flows. They are extremely simple in comparison to getting a new account (or even an old one) in shape to do metered billing for Gemini inference.
I then want this API key to work, regardless of what gcloud “knows” about me — am I logged in to a GCP account? Don’t care. What’s my current “Project?” Don’t care. What’s the difference between Vertex and Gemini? Don’t care.
As I write this, I bet a startup could be launched just offering this as a wrapper. This is surprisingly painful!
Thanks again for all the work; looking forward to seeing more out of Gemini.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key?authuser=1
I think I get why AI Studio exists, seems it enables people to prototype AI apps while hiding the complexity of the GCP console, despite the fact that (I assume) most AI Studio api calls are routed through Vertex in some way. Maybe it’s just confusing precisely because I’ve used GCP before.
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.
https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...
Could have changed recently. I'm not a user so I can't verify.
Using the API would have cost me $1200 this month, if I didn't have a subscription.
I'm a somewhat extensive user, but most of my coworkers are using $150-$400/month with the API.
Some googling lands me to a guide: https://cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/discover/set-up-gemini#...
I stopped there because i don't want to signup i just wanted to review, but i don't have an admin panel or etc.
It feels insane to me that there's a readme on how to give them money. Claude's Max purchase was just as easy as Pro, fwiw.
It's a frigg'n mess. Everyone at our little startup has spent time trying to understand what the actual offerings are; what the current set of entitlements are for different products; and what API keys might be tied to what entitlements.
I'm with __MatrixMan__ -- it's super confusing and needs some serious improvements in clarity.
A ChatBot is more like a fixed-price buffet where usage is ultimately human limited (even if the modest eaters are still subsidizing the hogs). An agentic system is going to consume resources in much more variable manner, depending on how it is being used.
> Some jerk has learned that we prefer CLI things and has come to the conclusion that we should therefore pay extra for them
Obviously these companies want you to increase the amount of their product you consume, but it seems odd to call that a jerk move! FWIW, Anthropic's stated motivation for Claude Code (which Gemini is now copying) was be agnostic to your choice of development tools since CLI access is pretty much ubiquitous, even inside IDEs. Whether it's the CLI-based design, the underlying model, or the specifics of what Claude Code is capable of, they seem to have got something right, and apparently usage internal to Anthropic skyrocketed just based on word of mouth.
It's just a UI difference.
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.
Not sure what you mean by "full access", as none of the providers offer unrestricted usage. Pro gets you 2.5 Pro with usage limits. Ultra gets you higher limits + deep think (edit: accidentally put research when I meant think where it spends more resources on an answer) + much more Veo 3 usage. And of course you can use the API usage-billed model.
In enterprises, Microsoft’s value proposition is that you’re leveraging all of the controls that you already have! Except… who is happy with the state of SharePoint governance?
In certain areas, perhaps, but Google Workspace at $14/month not only gives you Gemini Pro, but 2 TB of storage, full privacy, email with a custom domain, and whatever else. College students get the AI pro plan for free. I recently looked over all the options for folks like me and my family. Google is obviously the right choice, and it's not particularly close.
Google is fumbling with the marketing/communication - when I look at their stuff I am unclear on what is even available and what I already have, so I can't form an opinion about the price!
No, you cannot use neither Gemini CLI nor Code Assist via Workspace — at least not at the moment. However, if you upgrade your Workspace plan, you can use Gemini Advanced via the Web or app interfaces.
Workspace (standard?) customer for over a decade.
In the case of Gemini CLI, it seems Google does not even support Workspace accounts in the free tier. If you want to use Gemini CLI as a Workspace customer, you must pay separately for it via API billing (pay-as-you-go). Otherwise, the alternative is to login with a personal (non-Workspace) account and use the free tier.
I was wondering what Gemini Advanced is. I don't see any mention of a Gemini Advanced here, but there is a Gemini Pro and a Gemini Ultra: https://gemini.google/subscriptions/
I had gotten the impression that Workspace might entitle us to some API credits or something based on section 3A here where they describe how to authenticate with the API via your Workspace account https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c... . That document does explicitly mention "Gemini Code Assist for Workspace" but I think I saw another website from Google agreeing with you and saying you can't use it with a Workspace account currently.
Yeah, this is all a mess. Time to go back to bed for six months and just continue using whatever my corporate overlords have already handed to me
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleGeminiAI/comments/1jrynhk/war...
What does set Gemini via Workspace apart from other offerings like AI Studio is the nerfed output limit and safety filters. Also, I never got Gemini to ground replies in Google search, except when in Deep Research, or to execute code. Finally, Workspace users of Gemini either cannot keep their chat history, or have to keep the entire history for a predetermined period (deleting individual chats is not allowed).
(Update: Oh.. I'm only on business starter, I should be on business standard. need more business!)
Absolutely no offense but why do you (and a lot of people here) believe Google paid products gives you any privacy ?
I’m pretty sure even if they wanted to respect privacy of a subset of their users, they must have so much legacy code and data everywhere that they couldn’t even do it if they wanted to. And I’m not sure they’d want it anyway.
It's the second time I read this in this thread. May I ask why you think this is the case? And in which domains? I am very satisfied with 2.5 pro when it comes to philosophical/literary analysis, probably because of the super long context I can fill with whole books, and wanted to try Claude Code for the same purpose, but with folders, summaries, etc to make up for the shorter context length.
But also for text review on posts, etc.
Before Claude had the edge with agentic coding at least, but now even that is slipping.
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.
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)
Copilot is stating the plans for its own services are confusing. Summarizing it as "regurgitation of an LLM" doesn't adequately capture the purpose of the post.
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.
It's not in Basic, Standard or Premium.
It's in a new tier called "Google AI Pro" which I think is worth inclusion in your catalogue of product confusion.
Oh wait, there's even more tiers that for some reason can't be paid for annually. Weird... why not? "Google AI Ultra" and some others just called Premium again but now include AI. 9 tiers, 5 called Premium, 2 with AI in the name but 6 that include Gemini. What a mess.
This is less about internal systems and more about either incompetence or active sabotage.
Tip: If you do annual billing for "Premium (5 TB)", you end up paying $21/month for 5TB of storage and the same AI features of "Google AI pro (2TB)"; which is only $1/month more than doing "Google AI Pro (2 TB)" (which only has monthly billing)
For me, it shows all the Gemini stuff in Premium, even the 5TB version.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250611035305/https://one.googl...
I wonder what it will be next week.
I'm sure there is technically nothing that stopped you from treating this "Pay with Apple" thing as just another payment method inside the google account, except maybe additional complexity and red-tape.
Seen this many times when PMs, POs, and Devs code by features instead of trying to actually solve something. I don't even want to know what mess of a database schema is behind this monstrosity.
Apple is selling you a huge lucrative market.
Customers buy Apple’s curated marketplace.
Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.
Believe me, I would never pay for most of the apps that I did pay for via Apple if it wasn’t via their marketplace and their consumer protections.
There is no counterfactual scenario where you and millions(!) of other ISVs get 100% of the same money without Apple.
What’s difficult to understand about these business relationships?
Enabling this like Ticketmaster enables selling tickets.
In ticketmaster's case I believe they give kickbacks and lucrative exclusive contracts with large venues, to squeeze smaller ones, maybe making whole tours use it but only kicking back to the biggest or select venues on the tour I think.
Apple sometimes does special deals and special rules with important providers, among many other tactics behind their moat. All single signons must also offer apple single sign-on, for instance, and they have even disabled access to customer accounts using their single sign-on for unrelated business disputes, though they walked it back in the big public example I'm aware of, the threat is there if you go against them in any way.
Ticketmaster is in no way comparable, because they gouge customers and provide no protections.
Someone in the music industry explained that both bands and venues like Ticketmaster because then Ticketmaster is the "bad guy" and the band can just shrug their shoulders and pretend to be the victim while profiting enormously from Ticketmaster's evil practices.
Okay, all the app developers pull out of iOS because they're not actually useful, in fact they should be paying Apple!
How many people do you think would still buy iPhones if there are 0 apps on the app store? Lmaooo, it's almost like it's a co-operative relationship and Apple don't deserve a huge cut because it's the apps that sell their phones.
I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.
Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.
No way for you to scam me or make it hard ro cancel. I can view them all in the apple account subscription view.
No tricks, no unexpected behaviour.
You can't say a slave is free because their master is free to enslave them, and they're free to escape if they can. Sometimes you need rules to create real freedom.
Stripe already is a second place, non centralized, off platform.
I don't want to hunt down my predatory subscriptions in multiple places.
In the same vein: Games don’t cost less on the epic store despite their lower (compared to Steam) either, so as an end user it makes no difference where I buy games.
Maybe you like paying an extra 20%. That's your business. But fees like that affect the viability of lots of business ideas, including games. Having lower fees increases the pool of indie games.
30% is a robbery, and the confusion on the customer "ownership" is true, but it's not useful for the discussion to negate the advantage the _garden_ offers to the basic consumer
Unless you're trying to cancel the Apple ecosystem as a whole...
At least on my side, thats fine / intended. As long as their is no useable regulations around unsub dark patterns, that type of firewall is what I want as a customer.
Google is really bad at effective advertising.
But I found it to a little bit clunky and I guess I like the ui of google, I mean, the point is to get the point across. If you really hate the gemini ui, I am pretty sure that there is stylus extension which can beautify it or change the styles to your looking.
I guess I am an android user but still I understand your icloud subscription but if you're only choice as to why to not switch to google is passwords (but maybe you can mention more?), then for passwords, please try bitwarden, I found it to be really delightful.
I used 1Password in the past, and it’s possible to reconfigure most things to use another provider (passwords, app storage, etc.). AFAIK, you cannot reconfigure the full phone backup, which you must manually do without an iCloud storage quota. But why switch providers if I’m on the Apple ecosystem and the service is priced at the same price tiers? (I also use “Hide My Email” occasionally)
The only difference will be Gemini. However, my most significant percentage of AI usage is currently on desktops. The free tier of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude is okay for use on mobile.
The UI part that I mentioned is this: Gemini is just a web app, which means that if you need to use AI from the selected text or the app you are using, you need to copy and paste or capture a screenshot. But ChatGPT macOS integration is much better. It’s a native app that you can summon with a key combination, and it can automatically put the active app/text in context. I evaluated multiple options, and in the end, the winner for me was Raycast AI, because their app UX is incredible, and you can integrate your prompt with existing tools very easily. With prompts like: “For each item in the current selection, add a todo in @Apple Reminders”, or things like “Use @firecrawl to scrap the current page, then create a table with all the product prices and use @finder to store a CSV file”. You can save the prompt in a preset and use it as a Raycast command. That UX change was like night and day regarding daily AI usage. I chose to pay for the Raycast subscription, even if it was more expensive than switching everything from iCloud to Google and paying for only one service.
My point in the parent post is that today, Google is the company most well-positioned to be the absolute leader of the AI space. However, unlike OpenAI, they don’t seem to care much about the UX (at least outside Android), but if you use the assistant to work every day, the difference a good chat UX does is huge.
you can export and import the passwords and you can sync your photos to google photos
This is very confusing how they post about this on X, you would think you get additional usage. Messaging is very confusing.
I also have a pro subscription and wish I could get an API key with that with generous quota as well but pro is just for "consumers" using Gemini app I guess
I can't find any way to upgrade to a paid plan, is this even possible for individuals, or is it just "free or enterprise"?
/Edit: Okay I went through the Gemini docs. I found that in Google Cloud you can enable Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise for the account
- Standard is $19.00/mo
- Enterprise is $45.00/mo
Difference between the 2 editions: https://cloud.google.com/products/gemini/pricing
/Edit2: Found the actual management screen: https://codeassist.google.com/overview
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!
Obviously everybody's requirements differ, but Node seems like a pretty reasonable platform for this.
If you have to run end point protection that will blast your CPU with load and it makes moving or even deleting that folder needlessly slow. It also makes the hosting burden of NPM (nusers) who must all install dependencies instead of (nCI instances), which isn't very nice to our hosts. Dealing with that once during your build phase and then packaging that mess up is the nicer way to go about distributing things depending on NPM to end users.
I guess it needs to start various processes for the MCP servers and whatnot? Just spawning another Node is the easy way to do that, but a bit annoying, yeah.
Claude also requires npm, FWIW.
I've forgotten how to count that low.
Or a hint about the background of the folks who built the tool.
It's the only argument I can think of, something like Go would be goated for this use case in principle.
Re-running `cargo install <crate>` will do that. Or install `cargo-update`, then you can bulk update everything.
And it works hella better than using pip in a global python install (you really want pipx/uvx if you're installing python utilities globally).
IIRC you can install Go stuff with `go install`, dunno if you can update via that tho.
A single, pre-compiled binary is convenient for the user's first install only.
(Aside from the fact that allowing "use pip" completely defeats the purpose of any other of these mechanisms, so it's a poster-child example of security-theater)
Reasoning: it’s a Python tool, therefore it shouldn’t require anything (any 3rd party package manager) beyond Python.
Its not.
Its convenient for CIs, for deployment, for packaging, for running multiple versions. It's extremely simple to update (just replace the binary with another one).
Now, e.g. "just replacing one file with another" may not have convenience commands like "npm update". But its not hard.
My point is that a pre-compiled binary is extremely more convenient for *everyone involved in the delivery pipeline* including the end-user. Especially for delivering updates.
As someone who's packaged Javascript(node), Ruby, Go and rust tools in .debs, snap, rpms: packaging against a dynamic runtime (node, ruby, rvm etc) is a giant PIAS that will break on a significant amount of users' machines, and will probably break on everyones machine at some point. Whereas packaging that binary is as simple as it can get: most such packages need only one dependency that everyone and his dog already has: libc.
The easiest is running "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade" and have my whole system updated. Instead of writing some script to get it done from some github's releases page and hoping that it's not hijacked.
Having a sensible project is what make it easy down the line (including not depending on gnu libc if not needed as some people uses musl). And I believe it's easy to setup a repository if your code is proprietary (Just need to support the most likely distribution, like ubuntu, fedora, suse's tumbleweed,...)
How many developers have npm installed vs cargo? Many won't even know what cargo is.
Just `wget -O ~/.local/bin/gemini-cli https://ci.example.com/assets/latest/gemini-cli` (Or the CURL version thereof) It can pick the file off github, some CI's assets, a package repo, a simple FTP server, an HTTP fileserver, over SSH, from a local cache, etc. It's so simple that one doesn't need a package manager. So there commonly is no package manager.
Yet in this tread people are complaining that "a single binary" is hard to manage/update/install because there's no package manager to do that with. It's not there, because the manage/update/install is so simple, that you don't need a package manager!
You might not know the reason ppl use package managers. Installing this "simple" way make it quite difficult to update and remove compared to using package managers. And although they are also "simple", it's quite a mess to manage packages manually in place of using such battle-tested systems
People use package managers for the following:
- to manage dependencies - to update stuff to a specific version or the latest version - to downgrade stuff - to install stuff - to remove stuff
any of these, except for the dependency management, are a single command, or easy to do manually, with a single compiled binary. They are so simple that they can easily be built into the tool. Or handled by your OSs package manager. Or with a "shell script" that the vendor can provide (instead of, or next to, the precompiled binary.
I did not say manually, you infer that. But I never meant that. The contrary: because it's so simple, automating that, or have your distro, OS or package manager do this for you, is trivial. As opposed to that awful "curl example.com/install.sh | sudo tee -" or those horrible built-in updaters (that always start nagging when I open the app - the one moment that I don't want to be bothered by updates because I need the app now)
The only reason one would then need a package manager is to manage dependencies. But a precompiled binary like Go's or Rusts typically are statically compiled so they have no (or at most one) dependency.
Imagine the ease of a single ".targz" or so that includes the correct python version, all pips, all ENV vars, config files, and is executable. If you distribute that - what do you still need pip for? If you distribute that, how simple would turning it into a .deb, snap, dmg, flatpack, appimg, brew package, etc be? (Answer: a lot easier than doing this for the "directory of .py files. A LOT)
pip is there so you don't need to do that. In the deployment world, you really want one version per system for everything and know that everything is in sync. To get that the solution was a distribution of software and a tool to manage them. We then extended that to programming language ecosystem and pip is part of the result.
But for workstation, a lot of people wants the latest, so the next solution was to be able to abstract the programming language ecosystem from the distribution (And you may not have a choice in the case of macOS), so what we get is directory-restricted interactions (go, npm,..) or doing shell magic so that the tooling think it's the system (virtual env,...).
It's a neat trick, but the only reason to do so is if you want to distribute compiled version of a software to customer. But if the user have access to the code, It's better to adapt the software to the system (repositories, flatpak...) or build a system around it (VM, containers, ...).
Also, react-reconciler caught my eye. Apparently that's a dependency of ink, which lets you write text-based UIs in React.
That and opentelemetry, whatever the heck that is
Anthropic's Claude Code is also installed using npm/npx.
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.
https://huggingface.co/jartine/gemma-2-27b-it-llamafile
Btw, the largest deps in this are React and Open Telemetry.
I really don't mind either way. My extremely limited experience with Node indicates they have installation, packaging and isolation polished very well.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg
or perhaps this one:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nexe
Again, I haven't used aider in a while so perhaps that's not the case.
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.
Appreciate all the takes so far, the team is reading this thread for feedback. Feel free to pile on with bugs or feature requests we'll all be reading.
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:
gemini "Say hello"
For comparison, claude lets you pass the prompt as a positional argument, but it does append it to the prompt and then gives you a running session. That's what I'd want for my use-case.{ "excludeTools": ["run_shell_command", "write_file"] }
but if you ask Gemini CLI to do this it'll guide you!
You can also extend with the Extensions feature - https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/e...
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.
Also this doco says GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID but the actual tool wants GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT
[^1]: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/google/...
Workspace users [edit: cperry was wrong] can get the free tier as well, just choose "More" and "Google for Work" in the login flow.
It has been a struggle to get a simple flow that works for all users, happy to hear suggestions!
Just a heads-up: your docs about authentication on Github say to place a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID as an environment variable. However, what the Gemini CLI is actually looking for, from what I can tell, is a GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT environment variable with the name of a project (rather than its ID). You might want to fix that discrepancy between code and docs, because it might confuse other users as well.
I don’t know what constraints made you all require a project ID or name to use the Gemini CLI with Workspace accounts. However, it would be far easier if this requirement were eliminated.
noted on documentation, there's a PR in flight on this. also found some confusion around gmail users who are part of the developer program hitting issues.
Well, I've just set up Gemini CLI with a Workspace account project in the free tier, and it works apparently for free. Can you explain whether billing for that has simply not been configured yet, or where exactly billing details can be found?
For reference, I've been using this panel to keep track of my usage in the free tier of the Gemini API, and it has not been counting Gemini CLI usage thus far: https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/api/generativelanguage...
Unfortunately all of that is pretty confusing, so I'll hold off using Gemini CLI until everything has been clarified.
Maybe you have access to an AI solution for this.
* First google forced me to start paying for my email domain.
* Then they increased the cost to force me to pay for AI features
* Now, I can't actually use the AI features without spending even more money, I could use them if I just had a gmail address and didn't pay google.
Well done Google, you've finally pursaded me to get around to transfering my custom email domain off google. Anyone have any preferences?
Do you mean that they stopped offering the legacy free tier and you had to upgrade to a paid plan? If that's the case, they reverted their decision and it was possible to go back to the free tier. I don't know if it is still possible, as this was 3 years ago, but here's a thread outlining how to do it. https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/urky...
When I heard about it (about 6 weeks after that post), I applied to go back to free, but was told I was too late.
1. CodeRunner - https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner/tree/main?tab=readm...
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?
other people use simon willison's `llm` tool https://github.com/simonw/llm
Both allow you to switch between models, send short prompts from a CLI, optionally attach some context. I prefer mods because it's an easier install and I never need to worry about Python envs and other insanity.
There's also wrappers that place the command directly in your terminal prompt if you run shelp-c
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.
Many of these are not even remotely similar.
So Vertex is like AWS Bedrock for GCP?
And not that there isn’t a level of knowledge you can gain to answer these questions, it’s just not clear.
Edit: I should mention that I'm accessing this through Gemini Code Assist, so this may be something out of your wheelhouse.
I don't think that's capacity, you should see error codes.
> 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
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!
Is the recommendation to specifically ask "analyze the codebase" here?
- 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!!
And thinking is stupid. "Show me how to generate a random number in python"... 15s later you get an answer.
I had a somehos similar problem with Claude 3.7, where I had a class named "Workflow" and it got nuts, producing code/comments I didn't ask for, all related to some "workflow" that it tried to replicate and not my code, it was strange.
A natural question to ask is, if in the near future, can Google One "Google AI Pro" subscribers have higher limits than what is offered for free users?
CC has this issue too, but way less often, and second shot almost always works.
- Here [1] it says "Project settings override user settings." How does gemini determine if we're in a project? Does it look for a `.gemini` folder in the current working directory as well as every parent directory up to the root? Would Gemini be able to read the contents of a subfolder of the CWD if the subfolder contains a different `.gemini` folder?
- I don't see documentation for the `selectedAuthType` field in the documentation for settings.json. Mine says `oauth-personal`. I could've sworn I signed in with my Google Workspace account. Does `oauth-personal` apply to Workspace accounts?
And a feature request: it would be nice to add a restriction in the settings.json file forcing anybody who uses gemini in that project to sign in to a Workspace account in a specific org (or use a specific project, I guess).
[1]: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...
High ROI feature requests:
• Pattern-based permissions - Bash(git:) to allow git but not rm, Write(logs/.txt) for path scoping
• CLI permission flags - --allowedTools "Read,Bash(npm test)" --deniedTools "Write" for session overrides
• Allow/deny precedence rules - explicit deny should override general allow (security principle)
• Config file hierarchy - system → user → project precedence for policy enforcement
Medium ROI improvements:
• Command argument filtering - whitelist git commit but not git --exec-path=/bin/sh
• Multiple config formats - support both simple arrays and structured permission objects
• Runtime permission diagnostics - gemini permissions list to debug what's actually enabled
• Environment variable injection - top-level env config for OTEL endpoints, API keys, etc.
The permission engine is really the key piece - once you can express "allow X but not Y within X", it unlocks most advanced use cases. Keep up the great work!
Use Jules, also by Google if you need what you describe.
Even with 1M context, for large projects, it makes sense to define boundaries These will typically be present in some form, but they are not available precisely to the coding agent. Imagine there was a simple YAML format where I could specify modules and where they can be found in the source tree, and the APIs of other modules it interacts with. Then it would be trivial to turn this into a context that would very often fit into 1M tokens. When an agent decides something needs to be done in the context of a specific module, it could then create a new context window containing exactly that module, effetively turning a large codebase into a small codebase, for which Gemini is extraordinarily effective.
I wonder if it is a concious decision not to include this (I imagine it opens a lot of possibilities of going crazy, but it also seems to be the source of a great amount of Claud Code's power). I would very much like to play with this if it appears in gemini-cli
Next step would be the possibility to define custom prompts, toolsets and contexts for specific re-occuring tasks, and these appearing as tools to the main agent. Example for such a thing: create_new_page. The prompt could describe the steps one needs to create the page. Then the main agent could simply delegate this as a well-defined task, without cluttering its own context with the operational details.
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...
But it is still worth a try and may be possible with some prompting and duct tape.
various forms of this are being discussed, this commentary is helpful thanks!
Edit: I tried it. The setup was a breeze. I fed the CLI two git commit IDs and some light prompting on what to look for. It gave a reasonable response. I'll try on a real PR shortly.
I think with better prompting on my end, as I have good experience with Gemini, this will be awesome. You probably could tweak a lot on your end as well, don't let it get stuck in cycles.
I strongly believe in AI cli apps for devs, congrats.
- Open-source (Apache 2.0, same as OpenAI Codex)
- 1M token context window
- Free tier: 60 requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day (requires Google account authentication)
- Higher limits via Gemini API or Vertex AI
- Google Search grounding support
- Plugin and script support (MCP servers)
- Gemini.md file for memory instruction
- VS Code integration (Gemini Code Assist)
We are now three years into the AI revolution and they are still forcing us to copy and paste and click click crazy to get the damn files out.
STOP innovating. STOP the features.
Form a team of 500 of your best developers. Allocate a year and a billion dollar budget.
Get all those Ai super scientists into the job.
See if you can work out “download all files”. A problem on the scale of AGI or Dark Matter, but one day google or OpenAI will crack the problem.
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.
Is your vision with Gemini CLI to be geared only towards non-commercial users? I have had a workspace account since GSuite and have been constantly punished for it by Google offerings all I wanted was gmail with a custom domain and I've lost all my youtube data, all my fitbit data, I cant select different versions of some of your subscriptions (seemingly completely random across your services from a end-user perspective), and now as a Workspace account I cant use Gemini CLI for my work, which is software development. This approach strikes me as actively hostile towards your loyal paying users...
... and other stuff.
Googlers, we should not have to do all of this setup and prep work for a single account. Enterprise I get, but for a single user? This is insufferable.
Have you managed to overcome that?
No mention of accessibility in https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/0915bf7d677... either
... it's a big deal because the only way to really make sense of using LLMs in any context is to have good observability data you can analyze later. And so the traces that they emit here will show all the CLI invocations, inputs/outputs and context for each chat turn in a session, and you can look for patterns that exhibit good or bad stuff.
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.