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Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

403 points by ayoisaiah 10mo ago

jasonsb 10mo ago
All these tips and tricks just to get out-coded by some guy rawdogging Copilot in VS Code.
- arresin 10mo ago
  It’s inferior but copilot is even more inferior to it. I used it again recently just to see after cursor And Claude code. It’s laughably bad. Almost like they don’t care.
albert_e 10mo ago
A lot it seems to mirror syntax of Claude Code Integration with Google Docs/Spreadsheets/Drive seems interesting but it seems to be via MCP so nothing exclusive/native to Gemini CLI I presume?
- vidarh 10mo ago
  There seems to be an awful many "could" and "might" in that part. Given how awfully limited the Gemini integration inside Google Docs is, it's an area that's just made me feel Google is executing really slowly on this.
  - neural_thing 10mo ago
    I've built a document editor that has AI properly integrated - provides feedback in "Track Changes" mode and actually gives good writing advice. If you've been looking for something like this - https://owleditor.com https://owleditor.com
    - vidarh 10mo ago
      It looks nice, but for my use it's very specifically not reviews I want in AI integration with an editor, but to be able to prompt it to write or rewrite large sections, or repeated references to specific things, with minimal additional input. I specifically don't want to go through an approve edit by edit - I'll read through a diff and approve all at once or just tell it how to fix its edits. Claude at least is more than good enough to do this for dry technical writing (I've not tried it for anything more creative), and so I usually end up using Claude Code to do this with markdown files.
- cavisne 10mo ago
  I think this guide is mostly AI slop. The Google docs section is full of "they might have support for this" "you could do this", "maybe they will add this MCP". How is that a guide?
3578987532688 10mo ago
My tip: Move away from Google to an LLM that doesn't respond with "There was a problem getting a response" 90% of the time.
- knollimar 10mo ago
  Are we getting billed for these? The billing is so very not transparent.
  - mhitza 10mo ago
    Would be nice to have an official confirmation. Once token get back to the user those are likely already counted. Sucks when the LLM goes on a rant only to stop because of hardcoded safeguards, or what I encounter often enough with Copilot: it generates some code, notices it's part of existing public code and cancels the entire response. But that still counts towards my usage.
  - dingnuts 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 10mo ago
    My experience working in FAANG.. Nobody knows
    - swyx 10mo ago
      we need a Nate Bargatze skit for these quips
  - qingcharles 10mo ago
    Copilot definitely bills you for all the errors.
    - lupire 10mo ago
      Gemini appears to bill random amounts for reasons nobody knows.
xbryanx 10mo ago
It would/will be interesting to see this modified to include Antigravity alongside Gemini CLI.
haxton 10mo ago
Why is this AI generated slop so highly upvoted?
- ericol 10mo ago
  Even thought the doc _might_ be AI generated, that repo is Addy Osmani's. Of Addy Osmani fame. I seriously doubt he went to Gemini and told it "Give me a list of 30 identifiable issues when agentic coding, and tips to solve them".
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- CamperBob2 10mo ago
  Because it's good slop.
agentifysh 10mo ago
agentic coding seems like its not the top priority but more at capturing the search engine users which is understandable. still i had high hopes for gemini 3.0 but was let down by the benchmarks i can barely use it in cli however in ai studio its been pretty valuable but not without quirks and bugs lately it seems like all the agentic coders like claude, codex are starting to converge and differentiated only by latency and overall cli UX and usage. i would like to use gemini cli more even grok if it was possible to use it like codex
bigcloud1299 10mo ago
I have never had a luck with using Gemini. I had a pretty good app create with CODEX. Due to the hype I thought let me give Gemini a try. I asked it find all way to improve security and architecture / design. sure enough it gave a me a list of components etc that didn’t match best patterns and practices. So I let it refactor the code. It Fucked up the entire repot. It hard coded tenant ids and used ids, it completely destroyed my UI. Broke my entire grpahql integration. Set me back 2 weeks of work. I do admit the browse version of Gemini chat does much better job at providing architecture and design guidance time to time.
- sampullman 10mo ago
  Do you use AI agents on repos without version control?
- ayewo 10mo ago
  > Set me back 2 weeks of work. How did this happen? Did you let the agent loose without first creating its own git worktree?
  - formerly_proven 10mo ago
    tfw people are running agents outside containers
    - bigcloud1299 10mo ago
      Yeah this something I need to get to.
    - bigcloud1299 10mo ago
      Apologies. I meant branch. I nuked the branch. But set me back a lot of time as I thought it may be few things here and there.
      - esafak 10mo ago
        I see! That is annoying. A good reminder to push or fork the branch for backup.
wg0 10mo ago
Gemini 3 with CLI is relentless if you give it detailed specs and other than API errors, it just is great. I'd still rank Claude models higher but Gemini 3 is good too. And the GPT-5 Codex has a very somber tone. Responses are very brief.
farnsworth 10mo ago
Am I stupid? I run /corgi, nothing happens and I don't see a corgi. I have the latest version of the gemini CLI. Or is it just killedbygoogle.com
senotrusov 10mo ago
>this lets you use Gemini 2.5 Pro for free with generous usage limits Considering that access is limited to the countries on the list [0], I wonder what motivated their choices, especially since many Balkan countries were left out. [0]: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/available-locations https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/a...
- oblio 10mo ago
  For Europe it's EU + UK + EFTA plus for some reason, Armenia.
SamDc73 10mo ago
A lot of times Gemini models will get stuck in a loop of errors in a lot of times it fails to edit/read or other simple function calling it's really really terrible at agentic stuff
- tekacs 10mo ago
  Not so much with Gemini 3 Pro (which came out a few days ago)... to the point that the loop detection that they built into gemini-cli (to fight that) almost always over-detects, thinking that Gemini 3 Pro is looping when it in fact isn't. Haven't had it fail at tool calls either.
  - SamDc73 10mo ago
    Tried in V0, it always gets into an infinite loop will give the CLI another shot
  - _heimdall 10mo ago
    Interesting, I run into loop detection in 2.5-pro but haven't seen it get in 3 Pro. Maybe its the type of tasks I throw st it though, I only use 3 at work and the code base is much more mature and well defined than my random side projects.
rgthomas 10mo ago
Nice breakdown. Curious if you’ve explored arbitration layers or safety-bounded execution paths when chaining multiple agentic calls? I’m noticing more workflows stressing the need for lightweight governance signals between agents.
timonoko 10mo ago
Gemini-CLI on Termux does not work anymore. Gemini itself found a way to fix the problem, but I did not totally grok what it was going to do. It insisted my Termux was old and rotten.
- Rebelgecko 10mo ago
  Make sure you've turned off the "alternate buffer" setting
lvl155 10mo ago
Gemini CLI sucks. Just use Opencode if you have to use Gemini. They need to rebuild the CLI just as OAI did with Codex.
- randomsofr 10mo ago
  what happened with Codex? Did they rebuild it?
  - dnw 10mo ago
    I too am curious. My daily driver has been Claude Code CLI since April. I just started using Codex CLI and there are lot of gaps--the most annoying being permissions don't seem to stick. I am so used to plan mode in Claude Code CLI and really miss that in Codex.
  - qsort 10mo ago
    The model needs to be trained to use the harness. Sonnet 4.5 and gpt-5.1-codex-max are "weaker" models in abstract, but you can get much more mileage out of them due to post-training.
  - month13 10mo ago
    Codex CLI switched from a typescript implementation to a Rust based one.
- agentdrek 10mo ago
  YMMV I guess but it's my goto tool; fast and reliable results at least for my use cases
  - colechristensen 10mo ago
    I'm constantly floored with how well claude-cli works and gemini-cli stumbled on something simple the first time I used it and Gemini's 3 Pro release availability was just bad.
  - dimitri-vs 10mo ago
voodooEntity 10mo ago
I really tried to get gemini to work properly in Agent mode. Tho it way to often wen't crazy, started rewriting files empty, commenting like "here you could implement the requested function" and many more stuff including running into permanent printing loops of stuff like "I've done that. What's next on the debugger? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the with? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the delete? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the in? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the instanceof? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the typeof? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the void? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the true? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the false? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the null? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the undefined? Okay, I've done that..." which went on for like 1hour (yes i waited to see how long it takes for them to cut it). Its just really good yet. I recently tried IntelliJs Junie and i have to say it works rather well. I mean at the end of the day all of them need a human in the loop and the result is just as good as your prompt, tho with Junie i at least most of the time got something of a result, while with gemini 50% would have been a good rate. Finally: Still dont see agentic coding for production stages - its just not there yet in terms of quality. For research and fun? Why not.
cjbarber 10mo ago
Notable re author: “Addy Osmani is an Irish Software Engineer and leader currently working on the Google Chrome web browser and Gemini with Google DeepMind. A developer for 25+ years, he has worked at Google for over thirteen years, focused on making the web low-friction for users and web developers. He is passionate about AI-assisted engineering and developer tools. He previously worked on Fortune 500 sites. Addy is the author of a number of books including Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, Leading Effective Engineering Teams, Stoic Mind and Image Optimization.“
- davej 10mo ago
  Also a winner of the Irish Young Scientist competition, 2 years before Patrick Collison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology_Exhibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology...
  - Y_Y 10mo ago
    I remember that win. Seemed super fishy at the time, with bizarre features like: - "the World's first ever, fully featured DVD playing sidebar" - "allowing users to send e-mails without needing to log-in to an account" - "an AI (Artificial Intelligence) animated speech character named Phoebe" Maybe this guy really did make a super original web browser with every bell and whistle as an independent sixteen year old. I never saw a release, so the mystery remains. https://www.irishscientist.ie/2003/contents_contentxml-03p149a_xml-contentxsl-is03pages_xsl.html https://www.irishscientist.ie/2003/contents_contentxml-03p14...
- lupire 10mo ago
  He's published 11 books in the past 5 years? Is he using AI assisted writing, too?
  - onion2k 10mo ago
    Some parts of the books are based on expended versions of blog posts.
  - deleted 10mo ago
qingcharles 10mo ago
Looking through this, I think a lot of these also apply to Google Antigravity which I assume just uses the same backend as the CLI and just UI wraps a lot of these commands (e.g. checkpointing).
preommr 10mo ago
I am not doing any of this. It becomes obsolete in literally weeks, and it also doesn't work 80% of the time. Like why write a mcp server for custom tasks when I don't know if the llm is going to reliably call it. My rule for AI has been steadfast for months (years?) now. I write (myself, not AI because then I spend more time guiding the AI instead of thinking about the problem) documentation for myself (templates, checklist, etc.). I give ai a chance to one-shot it in seconds, if it can't, I am either review my documentation or I just do it manually.
- verdverm 10mo ago
  I think both are helpful 1. starting fresh, because of context poisoning / long-term attention issues 2. lots of tools makes the job easier, if you give them a tool discovery tool, (based on Anthropics recent post) We don't have reliable ways to evaluate all the prompts and related tweaking. I'm working towards this with my agentic setup. Added time travel for sessions based on Dagger yesterday, with forking, cloning, registry probably toda
- russdill 10mo ago
  The ability of newer agents to develop plans that been be reviewed and most importantly do a build test modify cycle has really helped. You can task an agent with some junior programmer task and then go off and do something else.
- hsaliak 10mo ago
  I agree. Software development is on an ascent to a new plateau. We have not reached that yet. Any skill that is built up now is at best built on a slope.
- AdieuToLogic 10mo ago
  A perspective which has helped me is viewing LLM-based offerings strictly as statistical document generators, whose usefulness is entirely dependent upon their training data set plus model evolution, and whose usage is best modeled as a form of constraint programming[0] lacking a formal (repeatable) grammar. As such, and when considering the subjectivity of natural languages in general, the best I hope for when using them are quick iterations consisting of refining constraint sentence fragments. Here is a simple example which took 4 iterations using Gemini to get a result requiring no manual changes: # Role You are an expert Unix shell programmer who comments their code and organizes their code using shell programming best practices. Create a bash shell script which reads from standard input text in Markdown format and prints all embedded hyperlink URL's. The script requirements are: - MUST exclude all inline code elements - MUST exclude all fenced code blocks - MUST print all hyperlink URL's - MUST NOT print hyperlink label - MUST NOT use Perl compatible regular expressions - MUST NOT use double quotes within comments - MUST NOT use single quotes within comments EDIT: For reference, a hand-written script satisfying the above (excluding comments for brevity) could look like: #!/usr/bin/env bash perl -ne 'print unless /^```/ ... /^```/' | sed -e 's/`[^`]*`//g' | egrep -o '\[.+?\]$.+?$' | sed -e 's/^.*(//' -e 's/)$//' 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming
ossa-ma 10mo ago
Kinda useful, especially tip 15 and tip 26. There needs to be a lot more focus on the observability and showing users what is happening underneath the hood (especially wrt costs and context management for non-power users). A useful feature Cursor has that Antigravity doesn't is the context wheel that increases as you reach the context window limit (but don't get me started on the blackbox that is Cursor pricing).
kachapopopow 10mo ago
ymmv, but I think all of this is too much and you generally don't need to think about how to use an AI properly since screaming at it usually works just as well as very fine tuned instructions. you don't need claude code, gemini-cli or codex I've been doing it raw as a (recent) lazyvim user with a proprietary agent with 3 tools: git, ask and ripgrep and currently gemini 3 is by far the best for me even without all these tricks. gemini 3 has a very high token density and a significantly larger context than any model that is actually usable, every 'agent' I start shoves 5 things into the context: - most basic instructions such as: generate git format diff only when editing files and use the git tool to merge it (simplified, it's more structured and deeper than this) - tree command that respects git ignore - $(ask "summarize $(git diff)") - $(ask "compact the readme $(cat README.MD")) - (ripgrep tools, mcp details, etc) when the context is too bloated I just tell it to write important new details to README.MD and then start a new agent https://github.com/kagisearch/ask https://github.com/kagisearch/ask
- xyzzy_plugh 10mo ago
  I'm doing something very similar but even simpler and Gemini 3 is absolutely crushing it. I tried to do this with other models in the past, but it never really felt productive. I don't even generate diffs, just full files (though I try and keep them small) and my success rate is probably close to 80% one-shotting very complex coding tasks that would take me days.
  - kachapopopow 10mo ago
    problem without diffs is that it overrides your changes which gets really old and annoying. earlier models couldn't generate diffs and I had to generate them which was jank since sometimes it would generate unmergeable code
wowamit 10mo ago
I am worried that we are diverging with CLI updates across models. I wish we had converged towards a common functionality and behaviour. Instead, we need to build knowledge of model-specific nuances. The cost of choosing a model is high.
terrywang 10mo ago
Gemini CLI at this stage isn't good at complex coding tasks (vs. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, Qoder CLI, etc.). Mostly because of the simple ReAct loop, compounded by relatively weak tool calling capability of the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. > I haven't tried complex coding tasks using Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview yet. I reckon it won't be materially different. Gemini CLI is open source and being actively developed, which is cool (/extensions, /model switching, etc.). I think it has the potential to become a lot better and even close to top players. The correct way of using Gemini CLI is: ABUSE IT! With 1M Context Window (soon to be 2M) and generous daily (free) quota are huge advantages. It's a pity that people don't use it enough (ABUSE it!). I use it as a TUI / CLI tool to orchestrate tasks and workflows. > Fun fact: I found Gemini CLI pretty good at judging/critiquing code generated by other tools LoL Recently I even hook it up with homebrew via MCP (other Linux package managers as well?), and a local LLM powered Knowledge/Context Manager (Nowledge Mem), you can get really creative abusing Gemini CLI, unleash the Gemini power. I've also seen people use Gemini CLI in SubAgents for MCP Processing (it did work and avoided polluting the main context), can't help laughing when I first read this -> https://x.com/goon_nguyen/status/1987720058504982561 https://x.com/goon_nguyen/status/1987720058504982561
- conception 10mo ago
  Gemini CLI is a wild beast. The stories of it just going bonkers and refactoring everything it reads on its own are not rare. My own experience was something like, "Edit no code. Only give me suggestions. blah blah blah" first thing it does is edit a file without any other output. It's completely unreliable. Pro 3 is -very- smart but it's tool use/following directions isn't great.
  - zeven7 10mo ago
    I've been using Gemini 3 in the CLI for the past few days. Multiple times I've asked it to fix one specific lint error, and it goes off and fixes all of them. A lot of times it fixes them by just disabling lint rules. It makes reviewing much harder. It really has a mind of its own and sometimes starts grinding for 20 minutes doing all kinds of things - most of them pretty good, but again, challenging to review. I wish it would stick to the task.
novoreorx 10mo ago
I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic, so that LLM providers wouldn't bother reinventing their own wheels like Codex and Gemini-CLI. They should be pluggable providers, not independent programs. In this way, the CLI would focus on refining the agentic logic and would grow faster than ever before. Currently Claude Code is the best, but I don't think Anthropic would pivot it into what I described. Maybe we still need to wait for the next groundbreaking open-source coding agent to come out.
- syspec 10mo ago
  There are actually a lot of those! One of the best things about using them is that you can swap models around at will. I love to switch models and ask them what they thought of the previous models answer
- daigoba66 10mo ago
  > I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic Cursor? It’s really quite good. Ironically it has its own LLM now, https://cursor.com/blog/composer https://cursor.com/blog/composer, so it’s sort of going the other way.
- rubenvanwyk 10mo ago
  Goose?
- ssivark 10mo ago
  Opencode (from SST; not the thing that got rebranded as Crush) seems to be just that. I've had a very good experience with it for the last couple of days; having previously used gemini-cli quite a bit. Opencode also has/hosts a couple of "free" models options right now, which are quite decent IMO. https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode There are many many similar alternatives, so here's a random sampling: Crush, Aider, Amp Code, Emacs with gptel/acp-shell, Editor Code Assistant (which aims for an editor-agnostic backend that plugs into different editors) Finally... there is quite a lot of scope for co-designing the affordances / primitives supported by the coding agent and the LLM backing it (especially in LLM post-training). So factorizing these two into completely independent pieces currently seems unlikely to give the most powerful capabilities.
lupire 10mo ago
Antigravity obsoleted Gemini CLI, right?
lupire 10mo ago
How many of these 30 tips can replaced by Tip 8: tell Gemini to read the tips and update its own prompt?
MarkMarine 10mo ago
I love the model, hate the tool. I’ve taken complex stuff and given it to Gemini 3 and been impressed, but Anthropic has the killer app with Claude Code. The interplay of sonnet (a decent model) and the tools and workflow they’ve got with Claude code around it supercharge the outcome. I tried Gemini cli for about 5 seconds and was so frustrated, it’s so stupid at navigation in the codebase it takes 10x as long to do anything or I have to guide it there. I have to supervise it rather than doing something important while Claude works in the background
swyx 10mo ago
> $ time gemini -p "hello world" > Loaded cached credentials. > Hello world! I am ready for your first command. > gemini -p "hello world" 2.35s user 0.81s system 33% cpu 29.454 total seeing between 10-80 seconds for responses on hello world. 10-20s of which is for loading the god damn credentials. this thing needs a lot of work.
INTPenis 10mo ago
I've been using Gemini CLI for months now, mainly because we have a free subscription for it through work. Tip 1, it consistently ignores my GEMINI.md file, both global and local. Even though it's always saying that "1 GEMINI.md file is being used", probably because the file exists in the right path. Tip 12, had no idea you could do this, seems like a great tip to me. Tip 16 was great, thanks. I've been restarting it everytime my environment changes for some reason. Or having it run direnv for me. All the same warnings about AI apply for Gemini CLI, it hallucinates wildly. But I have to say gemini cli gave me my first real fun experience using AI. I was a late comer to AI, but what really hooked me was when I gave it permission to freely troubleshoot a k8s PoC cluster I was setting up. Watching it autonomously fetch logs, objects, troubleshoot until it found the error was the closest thing to getting a new toy for christmas for me in many years. So I've kept using it, but it is frustrating sometimes when AI is behaving so stupid you just /quit and do it yourself.
- terrywang 10mo ago
  Thanks for sharing. Gemini CLI doing live troubleshooting for a K8s cluster is surreal. I am keen to try that out, since I have just created RKE2 clusters.
chewz 10mo ago
The problem is that Gemini CLI simply doesn’t work. Beside simplest of tasks like creating new release it is useless as coding assistant. Doesn’t have a plan mode, jumps right into coding and then gets stuck in the middle of spaghetti code. Gemini models are actually pretty capable but Gemini CLI tooling makes them dumb and useless. Google is simply months behind Anthropic and OpenAI in this space!
blutoot 10mo ago
IMHO, one understated downside in today's AI/Agentic/Vibe-coding options is that ALL of them are evolving a bit too fast before any of these types of "best practices" can become a habit with a critical mass of developers, rendering many such tips obsolete very quickly (as another person rightfully pointed out). Sure, software in general will keep evolving rapidly but the methods and tools to build software need to be relatively more stable. E.g. many languages and frameworks come and go, but how we break down a problem, how we discover and understand codebases, etc. have more or less remained steady (I think). I see this a paradox and have no idea what the state of equalibrium will look like.
booleandilemma 10mo ago
Tips and tricks for playing slot machines Best practices for gambling
snickmy 10mo ago
Addy delivers!
moondowner 10mo ago
Is there a similar guide/document for Claude Code?
rockyj 10mo ago
Its simple, just follow these 30 tips and tricks :D
rncode 10mo ago
we've gone from 'RTFM' to 'here's 30 tips to babysit your AI assistant' and somehow this is considered progress
game_the0ry 10mo ago
I like AI a lot. I try to use to as much as I can. It feels like it is becoming an essential part of making me a more effective human, like the internet or my iphone. I do not see it as a bad thing. But I can't help but to get "AI tutorial fatigue" from so many posts telling me about how to use AI. Most are garbage, this one is better than most. Its like how javascript developer endlessly post about the newest ui framework or js build tool. This feels a lot like that.
- insin 10mo ago
  People telling you how to/how they use LLMs has become utterly boring, doesn't matter if it's some rando posting this isn't just X, it's Y slop purely for engagement, or someone you like and respect (your Addys and your Simons) putting the effort in because they want to educate/inform. Boring.
- synergy20 10mo ago
  agreed, each vendor(gemini,claude,codex...) should have an easy to follow best-practice on their homepages, better, they all agree on some agents.md style, to lessen the cognitive load on humans.
Razengan 10mo ago
This just after "Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048996 Who the heck trusts this jank to have wanton reign on their system?
jason-richar15 10mo ago
[dead]
DevShorya 10mo ago
The contrast between manual scripting and LLM-assisted workflows is interesting. Both seem to fail when the constraints aren’t clear enough. When they are clear, the LLM becomes surprisingly reliable.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Joshua-Peter 10mo ago
[dead]
cookiejest 10mo ago
It's interesting to see the variety of approaches people are taking to get consistent results from LLMs for coding. The discussion around prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and even the choice of model (Gemini, Claude, etc.) highlights a common challenge: managing the complexity of different AI integrations. One way to streamline this is to use a universal MCP server. Instead of building and maintaining separate connections for each AI service, you can use a platform like [contextgate](https://contextgate.ai/ https://contextgate.ai/) to manage them all from a single point. This can simplify your development process, especially when you're experimenting with different models or tools to find the best fit for your coding tasks. It's a bit like having a universal remote for all your AI services.

403 points by ayoisaiah 10mo ago

jasonsb 10mo ago

All these tips and tricks just to get out-coded by some guy rawdogging Copilot in VS Code.

arresin 10mo ago
It’s inferior but copilot is even more inferior to it. I used it again recently just to see after cursor And Claude code. It’s laughably bad. Almost like they don’t care.

albert_e 10mo ago

A lot it seems to mirror syntax of Claude Code Integration with Google Docs/Spreadsheets/Drive seems interesting but it seems to be via MCP so nothing exclusive/native to Gemini CLI I presume?

vidarh 10mo ago
There seems to be an awful many "could" and "might" in that part. Given how awfully limited the Gemini integration inside Google Docs is, it's an area that's just made me feel Google is executing really slowly on this.
- neural_thing 10mo ago
  I've built a document editor that has AI properly integrated - provides feedback in "Track Changes" mode and actually gives good writing advice. If you've been looking for something like this - https://owleditor.com https://owleditor.com
  - vidarh 10mo ago
    It looks nice, but for my use it's very specifically not reviews I want in AI integration with an editor, but to be able to prompt it to write or rewrite large sections, or repeated references to specific things, with minimal additional input. I specifically don't want to go through an approve edit by edit - I'll read through a diff and approve all at once or just tell it how to fix its edits. Claude at least is more than good enough to do this for dry technical writing (I've not tried it for anything more creative), and so I usually end up using Claude Code to do this with markdown files.
cavisne 10mo ago
I think this guide is mostly AI slop. The Google docs section is full of "they might have support for this" "you could do this", "maybe they will add this MCP". How is that a guide?

3578987532688 10mo ago

My tip: Move away from Google to an LLM that doesn't respond with "There was a problem getting a response" 90% of the time.

knollimar 10mo ago
Are we getting billed for these? The billing is so very not transparent.
- mhitza 10mo ago
  Would be nice to have an official confirmation. Once token get back to the user those are likely already counted. Sucks when the LLM goes on a rant only to stop because of hardcoded safeguards, or what I encounter often enough with Copilot: it generates some code, notices it's part of existing public code and cancels the entire response. But that still counts towards my usage.
- dingnuts 10mo ago
  [dead]
- OsrsNeedsf2P 10mo ago
  My experience working in FAANG.. Nobody knows
  - swyx 10mo ago
    we need a Nate Bargatze skit for these quips
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  Copilot definitely bills you for all the errors.
  - lupire 10mo ago
    Gemini appears to bill random amounts for reasons nobody knows.

xbryanx 10mo ago

It would/will be interesting to see this modified to include Antigravity alongside Gemini CLI.

haxton 10mo ago

Why is this AI generated slop so highly upvoted?

ericol 10mo ago
Even thought the doc _might_ be AI generated, that repo is Addy Osmani's. Of Addy Osmani fame. I seriously doubt he went to Gemini and told it "Give me a list of 30 identifiable issues when agentic coding, and tips to solve them".
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
CamperBob2 10mo ago
Because it's good slop.

agentifysh 10mo ago

agentic coding seems like its not the top priority but more at capturing the search engine users which is understandable. still i had high hopes for gemini 3.0 but was let down by the benchmarks i can barely use it in cli however in ai studio its been pretty valuable but not without quirks and bugs lately it seems like all the agentic coders like claude, codex are starting to converge and differentiated only by latency and overall cli UX and usage. i would like to use gemini cli more even grok if it was possible to use it like codex

bigcloud1299 10mo ago

I have never had a luck with using Gemini. I had a pretty good app create with CODEX. Due to the hype I thought let me give Gemini a try. I asked it find all way to improve security and architecture / design. sure enough it gave a me a list of components etc that didn’t match best patterns and practices. So I let it refactor the code. It Fucked up the entire repot. It hard coded tenant ids and used ids, it completely destroyed my UI. Broke my entire grpahql integration. Set me back 2 weeks of work. I do admit the browse version of Gemini chat does much better job at providing architecture and design guidance time to time.

sampullman 10mo ago
Do you use AI agents on repos without version control?
ayewo 10mo ago
> Set me back 2 weeks of work. How did this happen? Did you let the agent loose without first creating its own git worktree?
- formerly_proven 10mo ago
  tfw people are running agents outside containers
  - bigcloud1299 10mo ago
    Yeah this something I need to get to.
  - bigcloud1299 10mo ago
    Apologies. I meant branch. I nuked the branch. But set me back a lot of time as I thought it may be few things here and there.
    - esafak 10mo ago
      I see! That is annoying. A good reminder to push or fork the branch for backup.

wg0 10mo ago

Gemini 3 with CLI is relentless if you give it detailed specs and other than API errors, it just is great. I'd still rank Claude models higher but Gemini 3 is good too. And the GPT-5 Codex has a very somber tone. Responses are very brief.

farnsworth 10mo ago

Am I stupid? I run /corgi, nothing happens and I don't see a corgi. I have the latest version of the gemini CLI. Or is it just killedbygoogle.com

senotrusov 10mo ago

>this lets you use Gemini 2.5 Pro for free with generous usage limits Considering that access is limited to the countries on the list [0], I wonder what motivated their choices, especially since many Balkan countries were left out. [0]: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/available-locations https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/a...

oblio 10mo ago
For Europe it's EU + UK + EFTA plus for some reason, Armenia.

SamDc73 10mo ago

A lot of times Gemini models will get stuck in a loop of errors in a lot of times it fails to edit/read or other simple function calling it's really really terrible at agentic stuff

tekacs 10mo ago
Not so much with Gemini 3 Pro (which came out a few days ago)... to the point that the loop detection that they built into gemini-cli (to fight that) almost always over-detects, thinking that Gemini 3 Pro is looping when it in fact isn't. Haven't had it fail at tool calls either.
- SamDc73 10mo ago
  Tried in V0, it always gets into an infinite loop will give the CLI another shot
- _heimdall 10mo ago
  Interesting, I run into loop detection in 2.5-pro but haven't seen it get in 3 Pro. Maybe its the type of tasks I throw st it though, I only use 3 at work and the code base is much more mature and well defined than my random side projects.

rgthomas 10mo ago

Nice breakdown. Curious if you’ve explored arbitration layers or safety-bounded execution paths when chaining multiple agentic calls? I’m noticing more workflows stressing the need for lightweight governance signals between agents.

timonoko 10mo ago

Gemini-CLI on Termux does not work anymore. Gemini itself found a way to fix the problem, but I did not totally grok what it was going to do. It insisted my Termux was old and rotten.

Rebelgecko 10mo ago
Make sure you've turned off the "alternate buffer" setting

lvl155 10mo ago

Gemini CLI sucks. Just use Opencode if you have to use Gemini. They need to rebuild the CLI just as OAI did with Codex.

randomsofr 10mo ago
what happened with Codex? Did they rebuild it?
- dnw 10mo ago
  I too am curious. My daily driver has been Claude Code CLI since April. I just started using Codex CLI and there are lot of gaps--the most annoying being permissions don't seem to stick. I am so used to plan mode in Claude Code CLI and really miss that in Codex.
- qsort 10mo ago
  The model needs to be trained to use the harness. Sonnet 4.5 and gpt-5.1-codex-max are "weaker" models in abstract, but you can get much more mileage out of them due to post-training.
- month13 10mo ago
  Codex CLI switched from a typescript implementation to a Rust based one.
agentdrek 10mo ago
YMMV I guess but it's my goto tool; fast and reliable results at least for my use cases
- colechristensen 10mo ago
  I'm constantly floored with how well claude-cli works and gemini-cli stumbled on something simple the first time I used it and Gemini's 3 Pro release availability was just bad.
- dimitri-vs 10mo ago

voodooEntity 10mo ago

I really tried to get gemini to work properly in Agent mode. Tho it way to often wen't crazy, started rewriting files empty, commenting like "here you could implement the requested function" and many more stuff including running into permanent printing loops of stuff like "I've done that. What's next on the debugger? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the with? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the delete? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the in? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the instanceof? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the typeof? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the void? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the true? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the false? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the null? Okay, I've done that. What's next on the undefined? Okay, I've done that..." which went on for like 1hour (yes i waited to see how long it takes for them to cut it). Its just really good yet. I recently tried IntelliJs Junie and i have to say it works rather well. I mean at the end of the day all of them need a human in the loop and the result is just as good as your prompt, tho with Junie i at least most of the time got something of a result, while with gemini 50% would have been a good rate. Finally: Still dont see agentic coding for production stages - its just not there yet in terms of quality. For research and fun? Why not.

cjbarber 10mo ago

Notable re author: “Addy Osmani is an Irish Software Engineer and leader currently working on the Google Chrome web browser and Gemini with Google DeepMind. A developer for 25+ years, he has worked at Google for over thirteen years, focused on making the web low-friction for users and web developers. He is passionate about AI-assisted engineering and developer tools. He previously worked on Fortune 500 sites. Addy is the author of a number of books including Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, Leading Effective Engineering Teams, Stoic Mind and Image Optimization.“

davej 10mo ago
Also a winner of the Irish Young Scientist competition, 2 years before Patrick Collison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology_Exhibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Scientist_and_Technology...
- Y_Y 10mo ago
  I remember that win. Seemed super fishy at the time, with bizarre features like: - "the World's first ever, fully featured DVD playing sidebar" - "allowing users to send e-mails without needing to log-in to an account" - "an AI (Artificial Intelligence) animated speech character named Phoebe" Maybe this guy really did make a super original web browser with every bell and whistle as an independent sixteen year old. I never saw a release, so the mystery remains. https://www.irishscientist.ie/2003/contents_contentxml-03p149a_xml-contentxsl-is03pages_xsl.html https://www.irishscientist.ie/2003/contents_contentxml-03p14...
lupire 10mo ago
He's published 11 books in the past 5 years? Is he using AI assisted writing, too?
- onion2k 10mo ago
  Some parts of the books are based on expended versions of blog posts.
- deleted 10mo ago

qingcharles 10mo ago

Looking through this, I think a lot of these also apply to Google Antigravity which I assume just uses the same backend as the CLI and just UI wraps a lot of these commands (e.g. checkpointing).

preommr 10mo ago

I am not doing any of this. It becomes obsolete in literally weeks, and it also doesn't work 80% of the time. Like why write a mcp server for custom tasks when I don't know if the llm is going to reliably call it. My rule for AI has been steadfast for months (years?) now. I write (myself, not AI because then I spend more time guiding the AI instead of thinking about the problem) documentation for myself (templates, checklist, etc.). I give ai a chance to one-shot it in seconds, if it can't, I am either review my documentation or I just do it manually.

verdverm 10mo ago
I think both are helpful 1. starting fresh, because of context poisoning / long-term attention issues 2. lots of tools makes the job easier, if you give them a tool discovery tool, (based on Anthropics recent post) We don't have reliable ways to evaluate all the prompts and related tweaking. I'm working towards this with my agentic setup. Added time travel for sessions based on Dagger yesterday, with forking, cloning, registry probably toda
russdill 10mo ago
The ability of newer agents to develop plans that been be reviewed and most importantly do a build test modify cycle has really helped. You can task an agent with some junior programmer task and then go off and do something else.
hsaliak 10mo ago
I agree. Software development is on an ascent to a new plateau. We have not reached that yet. Any skill that is built up now is at best built on a slope.
AdieuToLogic 10mo ago
A perspective which has helped me is viewing LLM-based offerings strictly as statistical document generators, whose usefulness is entirely dependent upon their training data set plus model evolution, and whose usage is best modeled as a form of constraint programming[0] lacking a formal (repeatable) grammar. As such, and when considering the subjectivity of natural languages in general, the best I hope for when using them are quick iterations consisting of refining constraint sentence fragments. Here is a simple example which took 4 iterations using Gemini to get a result requiring no manual changes: # Role You are an expert Unix shell programmer who comments their code and organizes their code using shell programming best practices. Create a bash shell script which reads from standard input text in Markdown format and prints all embedded hyperlink URL's. The script requirements are: - MUST exclude all inline code elements - MUST exclude all fenced code blocks - MUST print all hyperlink URL's - MUST NOT print hyperlink label - MUST NOT use Perl compatible regular expressions - MUST NOT use double quotes within comments - MUST NOT use single quotes within comments EDIT: For reference, a hand-written script satisfying the above (excluding comments for brevity) could look like: #!/usr/bin/env bash perl -ne 'print unless /^```/ ... /^```/' | sed -e 's/`[^`]*`//g' | egrep -o '\[.+?\]$.+?$' | sed -e 's/^.*(//' -e 's/)$//' 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming

ossa-ma 10mo ago

Kinda useful, especially tip 15 and tip 26. There needs to be a lot more focus on the observability and showing users what is happening underneath the hood (especially wrt costs and context management for non-power users). A useful feature Cursor has that Antigravity doesn't is the context wheel that increases as you reach the context window limit (but don't get me started on the blackbox that is Cursor pricing).

kachapopopow 10mo ago

ymmv, but I think all of this is too much and you generally don't need to think about how to use an AI properly since screaming at it usually works just as well as very fine tuned instructions. you don't need claude code, gemini-cli or codex I've been doing it raw as a (recent) lazyvim user with a proprietary agent with 3 tools: git, ask and ripgrep and currently gemini 3 is by far the best for me even without all these tricks. gemini 3 has a very high token density and a significantly larger context than any model that is actually usable, every 'agent' I start shoves 5 things into the context: - most basic instructions such as: generate git format diff only when editing files and use the git tool to merge it (simplified, it's more structured and deeper than this) - tree command that respects git ignore - $(ask "summarize $(git diff)") - $(ask "compact the readme $(cat README.MD")) - (ripgrep tools, mcp details, etc) when the context is too bloated I just tell it to write important new details to README.MD and then start a new agent https://github.com/kagisearch/ask https://github.com/kagisearch/ask

xyzzy_plugh 10mo ago
I'm doing something very similar but even simpler and Gemini 3 is absolutely crushing it. I tried to do this with other models in the past, but it never really felt productive. I don't even generate diffs, just full files (though I try and keep them small) and my success rate is probably close to 80% one-shotting very complex coding tasks that would take me days.
- kachapopopow 10mo ago
  problem without diffs is that it overrides your changes which gets really old and annoying. earlier models couldn't generate diffs and I had to generate them which was jank since sometimes it would generate unmergeable code

wowamit 10mo ago

I am worried that we are diverging with CLI updates across models. I wish we had converged towards a common functionality and behaviour. Instead, we need to build knowledge of model-specific nuances. The cost of choosing a model is high.

terrywang 10mo ago

Gemini CLI at this stage isn't good at complex coding tasks (vs. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, Qoder CLI, etc.). Mostly because of the simple ReAct loop, compounded by relatively weak tool calling capability of the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. > I haven't tried complex coding tasks using Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview yet. I reckon it won't be materially different. Gemini CLI is open source and being actively developed, which is cool (/extensions, /model switching, etc.). I think it has the potential to become a lot better and even close to top players. The correct way of using Gemini CLI is: ABUSE IT! With 1M Context Window (soon to be 2M) and generous daily (free) quota are huge advantages. It's a pity that people don't use it enough (ABUSE it!). I use it as a TUI / CLI tool to orchestrate tasks and workflows. > Fun fact: I found Gemini CLI pretty good at judging/critiquing code generated by other tools LoL Recently I even hook it up with homebrew via MCP (other Linux package managers as well?), and a local LLM powered Knowledge/Context Manager (Nowledge Mem), you can get really creative abusing Gemini CLI, unleash the Gemini power. I've also seen people use Gemini CLI in SubAgents for MCP Processing (it did work and avoided polluting the main context), can't help laughing when I first read this -> https://x.com/goon_nguyen/status/1987720058504982561 https://x.com/goon_nguyen/status/1987720058504982561

conception 10mo ago
Gemini CLI is a wild beast. The stories of it just going bonkers and refactoring everything it reads on its own are not rare. My own experience was something like, "Edit no code. Only give me suggestions. blah blah blah" first thing it does is edit a file without any other output. It's completely unreliable. Pro 3 is -very- smart but it's tool use/following directions isn't great.
- zeven7 10mo ago
  I've been using Gemini 3 in the CLI for the past few days. Multiple times I've asked it to fix one specific lint error, and it goes off and fixes all of them. A lot of times it fixes them by just disabling lint rules. It makes reviewing much harder. It really has a mind of its own and sometimes starts grinding for 20 minutes doing all kinds of things - most of them pretty good, but again, challenging to review. I wish it would stick to the task.

novoreorx 10mo ago

I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic, so that LLM providers wouldn't bother reinventing their own wheels like Codex and Gemini-CLI. They should be pluggable providers, not independent programs. In this way, the CLI would focus on refining the agentic logic and would grow faster than ever before. Currently Claude Code is the best, but I don't think Anthropic would pivot it into what I described. Maybe we still need to wait for the next groundbreaking open-source coding agent to come out.

syspec 10mo ago
There are actually a lot of those! One of the best things about using them is that you can swap models around at will. I love to switch models and ask them what they thought of the previous models answer
daigoba66 10mo ago
> I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic Cursor? It’s really quite good. Ironically it has its own LLM now, https://cursor.com/blog/composer https://cursor.com/blog/composer, so it’s sort of going the other way.
rubenvanwyk 10mo ago
Goose?
ssivark 10mo ago
Opencode (from SST; not the thing that got rebranded as Crush) seems to be just that. I've had a very good experience with it for the last couple of days; having previously used gemini-cli quite a bit. Opencode also has/hosts a couple of "free" models options right now, which are quite decent IMO. https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode There are many many similar alternatives, so here's a random sampling: Crush, Aider, Amp Code, Emacs with gptel/acp-shell, Editor Code Assistant (which aims for an editor-agnostic backend that plugs into different editors) Finally... there is quite a lot of scope for co-designing the affordances / primitives supported by the coding agent and the LLM backing it (especially in LLM post-training). So factorizing these two into completely independent pieces currently seems unlikely to give the most powerful capabilities.

lupire 10mo ago

Antigravity obsoleted Gemini CLI, right?

lupire 10mo ago

How many of these 30 tips can replaced by Tip 8: tell Gemini to read the tips and update its own prompt?

MarkMarine 10mo ago

I love the model, hate the tool. I’ve taken complex stuff and given it to Gemini 3 and been impressed, but Anthropic has the killer app with Claude Code. The interplay of sonnet (a decent model) and the tools and workflow they’ve got with Claude code around it supercharge the outcome. I tried Gemini cli for about 5 seconds and was so frustrated, it’s so stupid at navigation in the codebase it takes 10x as long to do anything or I have to guide it there. I have to supervise it rather than doing something important while Claude works in the background

swyx 10mo ago

> $ time gemini -p "hello world" > Loaded cached credentials. > Hello world! I am ready for your first command. > gemini -p "hello world" 2.35s user 0.81s system 33% cpu 29.454 total seeing between 10-80 seconds for responses on hello world. 10-20s of which is for loading the god damn credentials. this thing needs a lot of work.

INTPenis 10mo ago

I've been using Gemini CLI for months now, mainly because we have a free subscription for it through work. Tip 1, it consistently ignores my GEMINI.md file, both global and local. Even though it's always saying that "1 GEMINI.md file is being used", probably because the file exists in the right path. Tip 12, had no idea you could do this, seems like a great tip to me. Tip 16 was great, thanks. I've been restarting it everytime my environment changes for some reason. Or having it run direnv for me. All the same warnings about AI apply for Gemini CLI, it hallucinates wildly. But I have to say gemini cli gave me my first real fun experience using AI. I was a late comer to AI, but what really hooked me was when I gave it permission to freely troubleshoot a k8s PoC cluster I was setting up. Watching it autonomously fetch logs, objects, troubleshoot until it found the error was the closest thing to getting a new toy for christmas for me in many years. So I've kept using it, but it is frustrating sometimes when AI is behaving so stupid you just /quit and do it yourself.

terrywang 10mo ago
Thanks for sharing. Gemini CLI doing live troubleshooting for a K8s cluster is surreal. I am keen to try that out, since I have just created RKE2 clusters.

chewz 10mo ago

The problem is that Gemini CLI simply doesn’t work. Beside simplest of tasks like creating new release it is useless as coding assistant. Doesn’t have a plan mode, jumps right into coding and then gets stuck in the middle of spaghetti code. Gemini models are actually pretty capable but Gemini CLI tooling makes them dumb and useless. Google is simply months behind Anthropic and OpenAI in this space!

blutoot 10mo ago

IMHO, one understated downside in today's AI/Agentic/Vibe-coding options is that ALL of them are evolving a bit too fast before any of these types of "best practices" can become a habit with a critical mass of developers, rendering many such tips obsolete very quickly (as another person rightfully pointed out). Sure, software in general will keep evolving rapidly but the methods and tools to build software need to be relatively more stable. E.g. many languages and frameworks come and go, but how we break down a problem, how we discover and understand codebases, etc. have more or less remained steady (I think). I see this a paradox and have no idea what the state of equalibrium will look like.

booleandilemma 10mo ago

Tips and tricks for playing slot machines Best practices for gambling

snickmy 10mo ago

Addy delivers!

moondowner 10mo ago

Is there a similar guide/document for Claude Code?

rockyj 10mo ago

Its simple, just follow these 30 tips and tricks :D

rncode 10mo ago

we've gone from 'RTFM' to 'here's 30 tips to babysit your AI assistant' and somehow this is considered progress

game_the0ry 10mo ago

I like AI a lot. I try to use to as much as I can. It feels like it is becoming an essential part of making me a more effective human, like the internet or my iphone. I do not see it as a bad thing. But I can't help but to get "AI tutorial fatigue" from so many posts telling me about how to use AI. Most are garbage, this one is better than most. Its like how javascript developer endlessly post about the newest ui framework or js build tool. This feels a lot like that.

insin 10mo ago
People telling you how to/how they use LLMs has become utterly boring, doesn't matter if it's some rando posting this isn't just X, it's Y slop purely for engagement, or someone you like and respect (your Addys and your Simons) putting the effort in because they want to educate/inform. Boring.
synergy20 10mo ago
agreed, each vendor(gemini,claude,codex...) should have an easy to follow best-practice on their homepages, better, they all agree on some agents.md style, to lessen the cognitive load on humans.

Razengan 10mo ago

This just after "Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048996 Who the heck trusts this jank to have wanton reign on their system?

jason-richar15 10mo ago

[dead]

DevShorya 10mo ago

The contrast between manual scripting and LLM-assisted workflows is interesting. Both seem to fail when the constraints aren’t clear enough. When they are clear, the LLM becomes surprisingly reliable.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Joshua-Peter 10mo ago

[dead]

cookiejest 10mo ago

It's interesting to see the variety of approaches people are taking to get consistent results from LLMs for coding. The discussion around prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and even the choice of model (Gemini, Claude, etc.) highlights a common challenge: managing the complexity of different AI integrations. One way to streamline this is to use a universal MCP server. Instead of building and maintaining separate connections for each AI service, you can use a platform like [contextgate](https://contextgate.ai/ https://contextgate.ai/) to manage them all from a single point. This can simplify your development process, especially when you're experimenting with different models or tools to find the best fit for your coding tasks. It's a bit like having a universal remote for all your AI services.