Comment by IX-103
3 days ago
Jetski/Antigravity is a better piece of software. The Gemini CLI codebase looks like someone tried to vibe-code a Claude code clone in nodeJS, as it's simply not maintainable.
That being said, until recently Gemini CLI was better. It had support for persistent policies on what code could run without asking and had good extension hooks to allow you write extensions that influence policy (to perform complex logic like rewriting tool calls before they are executed).
Antimatter/Jetski only recently added support for remembering what commands are "always allowed" between sessions, the extension framework (excuse me, "plugins") has fewer features, and hooks have much less power than with Gemini CLI (and can't come bundled with extensions).
Maybe I'm just a cranky old greybeard, but to me, the fact that these CLI tools are written in Node, React, etc. says a lot about the type of devs that are building them
Nobody is getting rewarded for reinventing the wheel.
I don't mind if they use nodejs for this, but the Ink/React stuff is annoying. It wastes space and even makes it hard to copy-paste. Wish it could open a few pipes for raw in/out as an alternative.
There's nothing wrong with writing CLI stuff in Node. It has interfaces to work with terminals built-in that aren't unlike what you'd find in any other language. I say this as someone who has worked with ncurses in C a decent amount (and there is a reason I try to avoid doing so anymore!)
React, however, I do find questionable, even having read about and understanding the idea behind Ink.
Gemini CLI seemed more extensible, but the internal Gemini CLI didn't come with whatever it needed to deal with Google's internal tooling, and Jetski did. You were supposed to install those yourself in Gemini CLI, which I did, and it worked until it broke later, then I was like nah I'm not interested in keeping up with this. Which is of course not applicable to external users, but it suggested they were putting more eggs in the Jetski basket.
Also, Gemini CLI takes like 30-60s to start up, which is unacceptable when I'm starting it frequently in separate terminals and Jetski and Claude both start sorta instantly. I thought it must've been a dogfooding issue, but the external Gemini CLI seems just as slow. They're all similar stacks afaik, nodejs + react + ink.
Well, the first thing the "new" antigravity did was f^&* up all of my existing projects by replicating them (with one replica per conversation within each project). That's really bad.
I now have 45+ projects pointing at a the same 5-7 folders (the actual projects). Can I delete those extra projects? The warnings are sure telling me not to.