Google is bringing vibe coding to your terminal with Gemini CLI

Now, devs who prefer the terminal can get AI assistance, too.

See full article...

 

[gosand]

From gemini github...

1. Prerequisites: Ensure you have Node.js version 18 or higher installed.
2. Run the CLI: Execute the following command in your terminal:
   npx https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
   
   Or install it with:
   npm install -g @google/gemini-cli
   gemini
   
   
3. Pick a color theme
4. Authenticate: When prompted, sign in with your personal Google account. This will grant you up to 60 model requests per minute and 1,000 model requests per day using Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Bzzzzzt. No, no, no, and hell no.

I don't even log into my google account on my browser unless I absolutely have to, which is rarely. After I am done, I log out of it. I quit using google search a few years ago in favor of DDG. (DDG browser on mobile as well) People look at me like I have 2 heads if I tell them this, but I seriously do not understand why people are so willing to give up their privacy for minor conveniences.

Maybe AI is the future, and maybe I am just an old man yelling at a cloud. Maybe this is or will turn into the thing that my kids will be trying to explain to me like I had to explain VCRs/DVDs/computers/mobile phones to my parents.

 

[10Nov1775]

Capitalism is not perfect and does not generate fair outcomes in a vacuum but it is far from bullshit.

By working just as hard, earning just as much, and delivering twice the output you would be literally doubling your productivity. In essence you'd be twice as valuable to the economy without any increase in cost to the economy of that labor. This is a huge benefit to society as a whole as whatever services your code provides, there's now twice as much of it at no increase in cost to consumers.

I actually rather liked the rest of your comment, and I agree with your first paragraph quoted, but the second one is a bit curious.

Surely it's natural to ask why the fruits of doublings of productivity are distributed as they are—and to be unsatisfied with the answer that your productivity doubling is beneficial to society, but not to you individually.

The question is complicated, of course—individual human workers are only indirectly responsible (at best) for most large society-wide jumps in productivity. This is particularly true of the most notable and ongoing one, the computerization of work, which has caused an explosive (and still continuing!) increase in human productivity.

 

[Sharp Weiner]

I don't care if it's open-source, it's still a tool that people will take advantage of to be lazy which will result in more mistakes getting pushed into production, and it's still a tool that businesses will use to take advantage of the workforce.

You think open source is good?

 

[Fatesrider]

Hmmm I wonder if cli AIs will evolve into a means to simplify the use of the cli in general

I started out on computers with the CLI back in the 80s. TBH, I was never a fan.

When I went to college, which was in the 90s, one of my courses was Assembly, which is about as CLI as you can get (we used Notepad, mostly, for the "IDE").

But I'd taken some other languages and one was Delphi, which was a rapid application development language. So I wrote an IDE for Assembly. It would load up the basics, do some debugging and then compile and run the program. Saved like three steps and a lot of typing to pull up the terminal compile and run an assembly program and see if you got it right.

Of course, no one liked it because they wanted the simplicity of typing it out themselves. I don't think any of them were also writing books during their college years like I was in my spare time, so they may have had more tolerance for typing it than I did.

In that vein, CLI AI just seems like a huge step backward in "simplicity". It someone wants it clean and simple - which CLI tends to be - fucking it up with AI seems like the opposite of that. And to be fair, I'm far more of a fan of the CLI than I am of AI. And I don't like CLI's. I really can't imagine someone who likes CLI's being a fan of AI's in the first place.

Putting them together seems like dropping an inboard engine into a canoe.

 

[mygeek911]

At least, being on the command line, you can pipe the slop it generates straight to /dev/null.

And this is how the new-generation DDoS attacks begin.

 

[t_negative1]

I don't like this trend of CLI applications that look like CLI-GUI stuff, like with text fields and animated progress bars, etc.. (unless we are talking about HP's SAM or Microsoft's edit or nano)

It makes much more sense if they just output clean stdout that I can pipe into another application, otherwise what's the point?

(unless there's a flag or argument that will just give me clean stdout, then I take my point back)

you know there are extended ascii characters.

of course you can filter out stuff, but when its
useful, unless you're using a monochrome text only screen
(and even then)....

its always good to have feedback, and clean UI.

i think its better with them., and i'm coming from using
a DOS 3.0 CLI background.

i still pop into windows CMD quite a bit, with all the python
and github stuff nowadays. and i could use powershell too.
but i like all the meters, progress bars, and spinning - /-|-\ indicators

 

[Jarrex]

This reads like an advertisement, down to the headline. I thought at first glance it was an ad banner.

Pretty odd and out of the normal for in-house Ars articles.

This is actually pretty standard for Ars coverage of AI related grifting. Ars really loves pumping up the press releases from any of the LLM companies.

 

[isage]

Management: "With this tool you can be twice as productive!"

Worker: "So I'll get paid twice as much, or work half the hours?"

Management: "lol no"

Capitalism is bullshit.

Which political system would you prefer then?
This quip is about as useful as "money is the root of all evil". Particularly when you are typing this on equipment that only exist because of political systems based on capitalism.
Large companies in the US with monopolies that allows them immunity from laws that govern the rest if us in addition to laws that prevent other companies from competing on a level playing field is not capitalism. There is already an name for it. In the US, this is called lobbying. In other countries the term for paying politicians off is corruption.

 

[A_Very_Tired_Geek]

I don't care if it's open-source, it's still a tool that people will take advantage of to be lazy which will result in more mistakes getting pushed into production, and it's still a tool that businesses will use to take advantage of the workforce.

It's a disingenuous announcement at best. Only the CLI front end is Apache 2 licensed. The back end is not and never will be open source, that's the secret sauce.

I'm beyond tired of seeing billion dollar companies abuse the spirit of free software in the name of profit.

 

[Jarrex]

Which political system would you prefer then?
This quip is about as useful as "money is the root of all evil". Particularly when you are typing this on equipment that only exist because of political systems based on capitalism.
Large companies in the US with monopolies that allows them immunity from laws that govern the rest if us in addition to laws that prevent other companies from competing on a level playing field is not capitalism. There is already an name for it. In the US, this is called lobbying. In other countries the term for paying politicians off is corruption.

It actually is a form of capitalism - crony capitalism.

The unfortunate effect of capitalism is that if it's left unchecked it is complicit to corruption, like all other forms of economies.

 

[ReaderBot]

Capitalism is not perfect and does not generate fair outcomes in a vacuum but it is far from bullshit.

By working just as hard, earning just as much, and delivering twice the output you would be literally doubling your productivity. In essence you'd be twice as valuable to the economy without any increase in cost to the economy of that labor. This is a huge benefit to society as a whole as whatever services your code provides, there's now twice as much of it at no increase in cost to consumers.

Except all of that “value to the economy” goes directly into the pockets of the oligarchs who use it to depress wages and fire workers and insert themselves as profit-skimming middlemen into ever more areas. All of the “value to the economy” over the last 45 years that has increased the net worth of the wealthy 1000 fold has raised prices of food, housing, healthcare, transportation, travel, and nearly every other segment you can name, many times faster than inflation, while the rest of us have seen a steady erosion of our buying power and no gains whatsoever.

And that’s not even mentioning the political power that enables the whole con to snowball.

Capitalism as it is abused today is bullshit.

 

[benwiggy]

As with many LLM's I wonder if we're quickly approaching the ceiling of coding performance since they've already trained on all available written material.

If the current code-writing abilities of AI are the state-of-the-art, based on all the data available, then shut it down right now; because it's gash.

 

[LostFate]

Which political system would you prefer then?
This quip is about as useful as "money is the root of all evil". Particularly when you are typing this on equipment that only exist because of political systems based on capitalism.
Large companies in the US with monopolies that allows them immunity from laws that govern the rest if us in addition to laws that prevent other companies from competing on a level playing field is not capitalism. There is already an name for it. In the US, this is called lobbying. In other countries the term for paying politicians off is corruption.

Capitalism isn't a political system, it's a market system... And some sort of socialism/capitalism blend would be vastly superior to what we have now.

 

[tumblrfan69]

Capitalism is not perfect and does not generate fair outcomes in a vacuum but it is far from bullshit.

By working just as hard, earning just as much, and delivering twice the output you would be literally doubling your productivity. In essence you'd be twice as valuable to the economy without any increase in cost to the economy of that labor. This is a huge benefit to society as a whole as whatever services your code provides, there's now twice as much of it at no increase in cost to consumers.

On the margins you still get to negotiate for higher wages but what you are competing against at any slice of time T is NOT your improvement in productivity from some time in the past T-n; its your relative value compared to other workers at that time T. In other words, if you can deliver twice as much code as the guy next to you right now, you can negotiate for higher wages or move to another job or start your own firm where you can reap higher rewards for your competitive advantage. But if every talented engineer is picking up the same tools at the same time you are not competing against your past self who was less productive, you're competing against another engineer who is now just as productive as you are TODAY. The price signals sent by your wages and the wages of your competitors and the increased productivity of your labor all flow into the market and the end result is that new companies and business models become possible that weren't before; just one example that people are discussing is the possibility for bespoke code. Imagine a future where you don't have Windows and Office and etc., but rather a set of code written by LLMs specifically for your needs as an individual. Its too expensive to have armies of engineers to write software for just one person or a small group of people but as the cost of development decreases towards the cost of sand and electricity new businesses and applications will appear and generate both new opportunities for human flourishing and new opportunities for employment!

I have no idea where this new equilibrium will come to rest as LLMs are moving too fast and there are too many variables at play but we're already starting to see the predictable effects of LLMs in the tech industry. On the right tail of engineer wage distribution you have AI gurus earning seven figure salaries and on the left tail of the distribution, the fat tail, you're seeing unemployment tick up for new CS grads (guess which CS grads are getting jobs just fine and which are not!). In the middle of the distribution you are seeing a mixed bag of engineer salaries as some are earning more, some are earning less but the overall trend line is still positive (source).

In other words, the most successful engineers will be those that can use these tools to deliver code in circles around those that do not. Competition will drive out the less competitive as it always has. I'm 41 years old and when I studied CS in college we were deep in the most recent AI winter, so the way that I was trained as an engineer looks nothing like how engineers today are learning and will learn. I could put my head in the sand and keep writing code the way I have been for 20 years but I know exactly where that level of productivity will lead - pure management or the unemployment line. So I'm retraining myself on these tools daily so that I can still be an effective engineer and technology leader and any engineers in this thread need to be doing the same or they will be left behind.

It's incredible you wrote all this without taking your tongue off the boot for a single second!

 

[nancy-drew]

Is it?

I feel like quite a lot of articles in recent years have covered software service features.

Atomistic, less in-depth but more timely articles on small parts of software have also been a trend in recent years—these can indeed seem like press releases, but I think that's inevitable when most of the information available is limited enough to fit in the space of a press release.

It's true that Ars used to trend towards longer, less timely, and more in-depth coverage—and it still has quite a lot of that today.

Which means the appearance of these articles is less depressing than you might think: they haven't replaced classic Ars-style coverage, they're simply an addition to it.

I subscribe to Ars for their their independent and excellent journalism. However, this piece's apparent* nature -- the writer acting as the editor of what they received in a press packet, without critical interpretation or additional context -- falls short of my definition of journalism.

If the author had included a brief summary of their hands-on experience -- even just their impressions of a quick quick one-hour trial -- that would improve the article's merit as a piece of technical reporting. If it mentioned other tools providing AI in the CLI, perhaps with some comparisons and contrasts, that would also add value.

Without any such additional work present, I'm left to feel like this article was worth neither the author's time nor mine. I can find press releases on my own; I do not need to pay someone for them.

*I emphasize apparent as we're criticizing the appearance, tone, and subject matter on their face, rather than casting any aspersions on the author's intent. I don't doubt Mr. Whitwam's desire to do anything other than purely inform.

 

[Red Knight]

I actually rather liked the rest of your comment, and I agree with your first paragraph quoted, but the second one is a bit curious.

Surely it's natural to ask why the fruits of doublings of productivity are distributed as they are—and to be unsatisfied with the answer that your productivity doubling is beneficial to society, but not to you individually.

The question is complicated, of course—individual human workers are only indirectly responsible (at best) for most large society-wide jumps in productivity. This is particularly true of the most notable and ongoing one, the computerization of work, which has caused an explosive (and still continuing!) increase in human productivity.

It is natural to ask questions about the fair distribution of wealth in society. There are a thousand reasons why workers cannot advocate for themselves as effectively as owners can and capitalism absent guardrails levels off with workers at a state of destitution just short of revolt. My defense of capitalism is that, much like democracy, it is nonetheless better than all the alternatives we've tried. I oppose socialism writ large because I think elected officials and civil servants detached from price signals are not likely to be more effective at allocating capital than private enterprise. That said, I would've been a progressive republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt during the Gilded Age; I support government action that curbs the wildest excesses of capitalism and I don't think the wealthy should control all of society. So I support some combination of tax policy and funding for education that tries to simultaneously maximize human flourishing while providing opportunity for all workers to share in that flourishing.

Except all of that “value to the economy” goes directly into the pockets of the oligarchs who use it to depress wages and fire workers and insert themselves as profit-skimming middlemen into ever more areas. All of the “value to the economy” over the last 45 years that has increased the net worth of the wealthy 1000 fold has raised prices of food, housing, healthcare, transportation, travel, and nearly every other segment you can name, many times faster than inflation, while the rest of us have seen a steady erosion of our buying power and no gains whatsoever.

And that’s not even mentioning the political power that enables the whole con to snowball.

Capitalism as it is abused today is bullshit.

Don't mistake my defense of capitalism as a defense of oligarchy. As a supporter of the notion 'equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome', I support wealth and inheritance taxes at the global level. Generational wealth is corrosive to everyone, nepo-babies and the rest of us alike. I support, as Jefferson once argued, that in America the natural aristocracy should lead; the best of us from each generation should take power and run the system in the best interests of all. Meritocracy, not gerontocracy or oligarchy. If the elites f--- up then we go to the streets and the ballot box and scare them into doing a better job or pick new elites.

That said I think you're factually incorrect to argue that all of the value in the economy in the past 45 years has flowed to the wealthy and everyone else has seen 'no gains whatsoever'. I am happy to defend that our system, as imperfect it is, has continued to deliver a better life for everyone, not just the wealthy. Without a doubt we have our challenges but I think you're not thinking seriously about what America was like 45 years ago, in 1980. That was the last year of Carter's term; CPI was up 12.5% and up 13.3% in 1979 (source). Unemployment stood at 7.2% and would get worse over the next two years (the first two years of Reagan's term) until peaking at 10.8% in 1982 (source). Both of these metrics were the worst since WW2 or the Great Depression and are far worse than anything we've experienced in the past 45 years, even through wars and a global pandemic that killed millions and all that concentration of wealth that you and I object to.

But its not just raw economic data that tells me 1980 was worse for everyone than 2025 in America. For example, leaded gas was just starting to be phased out and the cost of this was roughly 2.6 points of IQ lost for everyone alive back then. The worst hit were the late baby boomers and early Gen Xers as they lost on average 7.6 points of IQ - half a standard deviation (source)! - from breathing lead gasoline fumes. The internet was just beginning in research and military labs but today even the poorest among us have access to essentially the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket or at a library.

We can't run the counterfactual of what would've happened if Bernie Sanders had been catapulted into the White House instead of the mayor's office in Burlington, but I am happy to defend we would have less human flourishing today if socialism had run wild in the US for a decade or two or three.

Have the wealthy concentrated wealth? Yes, to a level not seen since the Gilded Age and its why I support increasing taxes on them and using those funds on education, basic research, maybe even (market driven) universal healthcare or UBI. But if you want to tax oligarchs at such a high level that innovation grinds to a halt or if you want to give the government the power to set prices you will find me moving to staunch opposition because in my mind the cure at that point is worse than the disease.

It's incredible you wrote all this without taking your tongue off the boot for a single second!

Without a doubt, I am an example of someone who has been co-opted by capitalism. I was born poor (my mother was on welfare at my birth. I got free lunch in elementary school and the shame of being laughed at for picking up the lunch tokens the teacher gave - publicly! - to the poor kids in the class will live with me forever) but I went to college, got a good job, and now live a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. I wear these facts honestly and will not deny them. I encourage you to make suggestions of ways that we could materially reform and improve the system and I can promise you, without sarcasm, that I will consider and quite possibly support them.

 

[mattlantis]

This reads like an advertisement, down to the headline. I thought at first glance it was an ad banner.

Pretty odd and out of the normal for in-house Ars articles.

Seriously. When I saw this in my RSS reader, I thought I must have some Google feed in there that has started self-promoting way too hard. Really surprised to see it was Ars.

 

[tdobson]

Here's the context that should have been in the article:

This is Google's attempt to have a alternative to Claude Code. (Free to use but not Open Source).

People even forked Claude Code and hacked Gemini and other models into it, and released "Kode" - which is a version of Claude Code which uses other models.

The other competitiors are Aider (open source, but with a slightly different paradigm), and Cursor/Cline (similar paradigm, slightly different interface).

 

[cheesecakegood]

I've been using my API keys with the "aichat" CLI tool which feels like a great tool for those who don't want to let an agent loose in their command line. I can type aichat -e "rename all files ending in .txt to .md" and it will queue up a terminal command, which I can inspect, request an AI explainer of "what does this do" (if I myself don't understand it), edit, abandon, or choose to execute. It understands my terminal environment and OS version natively already. -c for code only snippets, and you can do regular chat sessions in terminal too if you wanted to.

But it allows the medium-experienced to do a lot of otherwise inaccessible but super useful bash (well, zsh nowadays) command wizardry very easily without disrupting your flow.

 

[breckenedge]

Wow, this article makes me sad for Ars.

No mention of Claude Code or Aider, which this product clearly rips off.

Just a veiled ad for a new Google product.

Writers, if you have Substacks, I’d be ok subscribing there.

 

[Okcomposite]

If you like the idea but are skittish about Google or want to use your own locally hosted LLM there's a similar open source tool called Goose.

 

[Podginator]

This reads like an advertisement, down to the headline. I thought at first glance it was an ad banner.

Pretty odd and out of the normal for in-house Ars articles.

This is something I am noticing more and more with Ars. Lots of press-release style articles. I don't love it.

 

[jasonmicron]

Some developers prefer to live in the command line interface (CLI), eschewing the flashy graphics and file management features of IDEs.

Damn right. The way nature intended!

 

[jasonmicron]

...and once they have half the population using it and unable to do the work on their own, the subscription plan kicks in - Ka-Ching!

Devil's advocate: can a Java coder write machine language? Everything is built on something that came before it.

Ars has a VERY good write-up on these types of coding generations. Written years ago but still true. Wish I could find the article, but I want to say it was in the mid-2010s

 

[Einbrecher]

I subscribe to Ars for their their independent and excellent journalism. However, this piece's apparent* nature -- the writer acting as the editor of what they received in a press packet, without critical interpretation or additional context -- falls short of my definition of journalism.

If the author had included a brief summary of their hands-on experience -- even just their impressions of a quick quick one-hour trial -- that would improve the article's merit as a piece of technical reporting. If it mentioned other tools providing AI in the CLI, perhaps with some comparisons and contrasts, that would also add value.

Without any such additional work present, I'm left to feel like this article was worth neither the author's time nor mine. I can find press releases on my own; I do not need to pay someone for them.

*I emphasize apparent as we're criticizing the appearance, tone, and subject matter on their face, rather than casting any aspersions on the author's intent. I don't doubt Mr. Whitwam's desire to do anything other than purely inform.

As someone who's been using Claude Code for a few months now, the article's tagline of "Now, devs who prefer the terminal can get AI assistance, too." tells me there's nothing "apparent" about that tone at all.

They didn't check shit.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

One of my hobbies is taking nature walks and using an ID app to look for potential garden specimens (local species that aren't endangered, are perennials, fit into a lighting/soil condition I have in mind, etc). It's decidedly lower-stakes than a lot of dev work.

But finding detailed information on many of these species is becoming increasingly difficult due to the profusion of AI-generated SEO-hogging slop, especially from Greg.app, taking up all the results.

I literally can't go out and touch grass with LLMs ruining it.

Enough is too much, burn it all down.

 

[albeec13]

The last thing I want to do is invite an AI into my CLI so it can open the doors for hackers and the future takeover of all our systems by SkyNet.

 

[tumblrfan69]

I started out on computers with the CLI back in the 80s. TBH, I was never a fan.

When I went to college, which was in the 90s, one of my courses was Assembly, which is about as CLI as you can get (we used Notepad, mostly, for the "IDE").

But I'd taken some other languages and one was Delphi, which was a rapid application development language. So I wrote an IDE for Assembly. It would load up the basics, do some debugging and then compile and run the program. Saved like three steps and a lot of typing to pull up the terminal compile and run an assembly program and see if you got it right.

Of course, no one liked it because they wanted the simplicity of typing it out themselves. I don't think any of them were also writing books during their college years like I was in my spare time, so they may have had more tolerance for typing it than I did.

In that vein, CLI AI just seems like a huge step backward in "simplicity". It someone wants it clean and simple - which CLI tends to be - fucking it up with AI seems like the opposite of that. And to be fair, I'm far more of a fan of the CLI than I am of AI. And I don't like CLI's. I really can't imagine someone who likes CLI's being a fan of AI's in the first place.

Putting them together seems like dropping an inboard engine into a canoe.

That just sounds like the others had a weird allergy to scripting. Like I have a ton of bullshit 5 line shell scripts all over just to automate little things that I routinely do.

 

[aliksy]

Which political system would you prefer then?
This quip is about as useful as "money is the root of all evil". Particularly when you are typing this on equipment that only exist because of political systems based on capitalism.
Large companies in the US with monopolies that allows them immunity from laws that govern the rest if us in addition to laws that prevent other companies from competing on a level playing field is not capitalism. There is already an name for it. In the US, this is called lobbying. In other countries the term for paying politicians off is corruption.

Worker owned collective, off the top of my head. I'm not an expert but there's a lot of writing about workers owning the means of production instead of a small sect.

Also you unironically invoked "yet you participate in society"? You've seen the comic, I hope?

 

[aliksy]

By working just as hard, earning just as much, and delivering twice the output you would be literally doubling your productivity. In essence you'd be twice as valuable to the economy without any increase in cost to the economy of that labor. This is a huge benefit to society as a whole as whatever services your code provides, there's now twice as much of it at no increase in cost to consumers

It's certainly a huge benefit to the owners who keep most of the profits, and they're technically part of society. It's just grotesquely inequitable.

 

[Quagaar]

ℹ Rate limiting detected. Automatically switching from gemini-2.5-pro to gemini-2.5-flash for faster responses for the remainder of this session.

ℹ Rate limiting detected. Automatically switching from gemini-2.5-pro to gemini-2.5-flash for faster responses for the remainder of this session.

ℹ Rate limiting detected. Automatically switching from gemini-2.5-pro to gemini-2.5-flash for faster responses for the remainder of this session.

...and now a message from our sponsors

ℹ Request cancelled.

 

[davidlars]

Total non-starter for me without the ability to point to a locally hosted model.

Which is why you should pipx install llm instead and get a flexible OSS CLI that connects to most LLMs, local or remote. I've used it for over a year, both with local and remote models.

 

[Red Knight]

It's certainly a huge benefit to the owners who keep most of the profits, and they're technically part of society. It's just grotesquely inequitable.

To be very concrete, here is a GINI Index graph for the United States from 1965 until today:

Spoiler

(By comparison, France's GINI has hovered between 29 and 34 for the past 30 years.)

Tell me what level of wealth distribution would be 'equitable' to you? I would generally support policies that had the effect of pushing our GINI down ~5-7 points but not more than that.

To put a finer point on it, I don't know if your definition of equity and mine are the same and that's the point I'm making upthread - do you mean equality of outcome (which I totally oppose) or equality of opportunity (Which I support)?

 

[San Diego Dude]

Here's the context that should have been in the article:

This is Google's attempt to have a alternative to Claude Code. (Free to use but not Open Source).

People even forked Claude Code and hacked Gemini and other models into it, and released "Kode" - which is a version of Claude Code which uses other models.

The other competitiors are Aider (open source, but with a slightly different paradigm), and Cursor/Cline (similar paradigm, slightly different interface).

Void is a really excellent BYOK/BYO back end Cursor alternative that is open source and works very similarly, OAI API compatibility lets you drop in LM studio or Ollama or whatever agent capable OSS models you may want to plug in.