Comment by Zarathruster
18 hours ago
Where are you using it? Is Gemini CLI at a usable state? It was a frustrating, miserable experience last time I gave it a shot.
Antigravity seems significantly better in comparison, but with lower usage limits. If I run out, I usually don't bother switching to Gemini CLI.
> Is Gemini CLI at a usable state?
Technically usable but with bad/broken code. I found 3 different bugs with 1 feature, found a duplicate feature (their vibe coding missed the fact that the feature was already implemented), and the docs were wrong. Other features were ridiculously badly implemented. Reported them all, submitted multiple changes. None were accepted. Their repo was a hellscape of AI-generated issues and AI-generated PRs; I think mine was the only one written by a human. This was a month and a half ago.
Google is one of the most valuable corporations in the world, yet even they shipped a turd of an app to real customers and can't even take a bug fix. I think AI coding might be cooked.
It's a vibe coded mess, really depressing from such a large company. You can tell it's AI-driven because they keep adding new useless features but not improving the UX or bug fixing the existing ones.
One simple example is you can use @ to reference filenames - but the file list is cached and never updates. Ask Gemini to split a file into two files, then type @ and the new files will never appear. Those kind of extremely basic bugs.
But hey, the text has gradient colours...
Gemini CLI has improved a lot in the past 6 months or so. Back when I used in the 2.5 Pro era it would get stuck in loops literally like 1/8 conversations and I eventually just gave up despite having access included in my AI Pro plan.
But last month I picked it up again and it has crushed everything I've thrown at it. As Codex limits tighten on the Plus plan it's been my main fallback and doesn't even feel like a downgrade when I switch over. Haven't hit a single loop so far using it nearly every day for several weeks so that problem seems solved finally, thank god.
I've been using it in the auto router mode and haven't felt the need to manually lock in the bigger model yet. It's incredibly snappy which I realized I really appreciate vs. waiting around endlessly for minutes each turn, but I've read other people's experiences needing to manually select the Pro model so YMMV.
I tried it the very first day it was available to Google employees, and it was not usable.
Then a few weeks back, I gave it another try and I was pleasantly surprised.
It was insanely good!
A colleague and I have been on-and-off trying to build a C++ binary against specific Google libraries for months without success. Then, Gemini CLI was able to build the binary after 2-3 days iterating and refining prompts
Hello fellow Googler. Please give Antigravity’s gLinux CLI a try. (That’s not its name but I won’t put an internal code name here, I hope you know what I mean).
I moved to it from Gemini CLI last week and it is phenomenally faster and more reliable. It only took about an hour to get all my hooks and skills ported.
As long as you force it to use the pro model and not flash, it is pretty usable. If you go with the default settings though, it will use flash aggressively which results in pretty bad code. I only use it with pro exclusively now.
Even with pro, I have caught it going off the rails a few times. The most frustrating was when I asked it to do translations, and it decided there were too many to do so it wrote a python script that ran locally and used some terrible library to do literal translations, and some of them were downright offensive and sexual in nature. For translations though, Gemini is the best but you have to have it do a sentence or two at a time. If you provide the context around the text, it really knocks it out of the park
flash is the fast (duh) model though. its not always beneficial to use pro. in practice: 1/ set to flash 3.1 ; 2/ force to pro...sometimes. mainly when the cli fails to predict what model to use.
note that it will sometimes fall back to flash 2, which sucks
Flash will absolutely destroy a complex codebase. It's like a drunk junior programmer. Don't trust it with anything more complex than autocomplete.
Pro is expensive, but good. However they've decreased the pitiful stipend they used to include in even the ultra plan to the point were it's barely usable. I pivoted back to ChatGPT Pro after the recent downgrade they gave Ultra users. Googles Ultra plan cost 2.5x as much and delivers about half the usage.
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I'm using it in antigravity, and fint it quite good. I have not managed to run out of usage on Flash. You can run Pro out of quota almost instantly, they really don't want you to use it if you're not paying $200 a month.
I do not use super broad prompts, though. None of this "build me a webapp" stuff. It's more like, "adjust this part of this class to do Y instead of X."
Also bonus: using it in Antigravity you can burn through all the Opus credit Google give you first to do all the planning and then switch it to Gemini 3.1 Pro to do the grunt work.
Have you compared Opus and Gemini to see if Gemini is any worse at planning than Opus?
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If you use the Pro model, it can handle fairly broad prompts. Flash is very basic (no thinking)
It's definitely not as good as Codex or Claude Code but it is cheap. You just have to manage it a bit more. I got a year for free with my phone and I still pay for Codex, so take from that what you will.