Gemini CLI v0.36.0: Scaling Intelligence with Subagents and a Refined Developer Experience

[srithreepo]

Let me start off by saying we are aware of the issues facing many users who are seeing unacceptable long delays before the model responds, and at times errors from Gemini CLI. We apologize for this issue, unfortunately we don’t yet have a fix for this problem. We are actively working on improving the situation and will update folks here once we make progress.

The v0.36.0 release is focused on Agents, a refreshed Composer UI and faster startup experiences.

🤖Subagents – Subagents are coming soon to a terminal near you.

• Subagents are now enabled on Gemini CLI and we would love for you to try it and give us feedback. Subagents allow Gemini CLI to delegate complex, repetitive, or high-volume tasks to specialized expert agents. Crucially, each subagent operates within its own separate context window, keeping your main session fast, lean, and focused on the big picture without consuming valuable tokens on intermediate steps.

🔩Few things for you to try ....

• Configure an agent by adding it to the .gemini/agents/ directory and it will automatically be discovered and activated. [docs]
• You can use the /agents command to list and manage your agents.
• You can use @agent to trigger the agent

🔦Spotlight: CLI Help subagent – The Gemini CLI Help agent can is meant to help you with all things CLI. You can ask @cli_help to fix config errors, help you learn details about features and much more. The @cli_help agent looks at packaged version specific documentation to help you achieve tasks. Here’s a few prompts for you to try – gif

• @cli_help help me enable Git Worktree Support
• @cli_help help me fix my mcp server configuration.
• @cli_help help me install the pickle rick extension

✨ Refreshed UI & Faster Startup

• Refreshed Footer Layout: With the refreshed layout, safety indicators—like YOLO or Plan mode—are now prioritized and do not get overwritten by other UX elements.
• Better in narrow terminal windows; The Updated UI now intelligently hides ambient tips on narrow terminals to prioritize system status and prevent text wrapping.
• Better status messages: We have also introduced granular, text-based updates (e.g., Waiting for model..., Executing hooks) paired with directional icons (↪/↩) for clearer feedback. (feat(ui): implement refreshed UX for Composer layout #21212, @jwhelangoog, @keithguerin)
• Immediate Startup Input: CLI Startup is now faster supporting immediate prompt typing and submitting. Any submitted prompts are queued and automatically queued and processed as soon as initialization finishes. (feat(ui): allow immediate user input during startup #23661, @sehoon38)

🎉 IDE / ACP & Extensions Updates:

• VSCode Workspace Context: The CLI can now read environment variables to add all open VSCode workspace folders to your Gemini context out of the box. (fix(cli): automatically add all VSCode workspace folders to Gemini context #21380, @sakshisemalti, @spencer426)
• Extension Skills Prefix: Extension-provided skills and slash commands are now automatically namespaced with a colon (:) separator to clearly attribute them to their source and prevent conflicts with built-in commands. (feat(cli): always prefix extension skills with colon separator #23566, @NTaylorMullen)

🎉Gemini CLI Extensions:

• SonarQube:
  • Perform code and security analysis to enforce standards, automate checks, and improve code quality within Gemini CLI
    • https://geminicli.com/extensions/?name=SonarSourcesonarqube-mcp-server
• Stitch:
  • Use natural language in Stitch to generate UI from text or images and manage design assets.
    • https://geminicli.com/extensions/?name=gemini-cli-extensionsstitch

🧭Policy Engine support for Redirects:

• Policy engine always policies now support redirect operators, When a command is allowed, now redirecting the output will also be considered allowed opening up new use cases. (#23579, @scidomino)

Small features, Polish, Reliability & Bug Fixes: A massive amount of changes, smaller features, UI updates (like fixing terminal flickering on small screens and rendering a new hand-crafted ASCII banner for logged-out states), robust path resolution in Plan Mode, reliability, and general polish made it in this week!

[raky291]

This is awesome 😄 thanks for the support for Subagents and Git Worktree; now I can use the Superpowers extension with a better DX.

[yakushevhk]

Wow

[leethan]

I'm a paid user affected by this bug/issue. How can I apply for compensation?

[adamoutler]

Gemini started working for me yesterday after I cancelled and was in a unpaid free account. So I purchased the $20 and used it for a while. Eventually I gained trust enough and went back to ULTRA and my account stopped working again!

It's not just Gemini CLI. It takes 2-minutes for Gemini App to respond. This affects my account on multiple devices. My wife is unaffected. I'm just using Gemini CLI with MCP and hooks.

I'm using ~10% of my quota on Gemini CLI and I can't use any more. I also can't use Google Gemini Assistant to turn on and off my lights in the house because 2m is totally unacceptable.

What do I need to do? To where can I turn?

[bedros-p]

I had to wait 7 minutes to get an output from Gemini CLI 😔
It kept looping in the output too, so I killed it, and in the usage stats output thingie it showed it made like 70+ requests for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, 50 for a flash model

Dunno why the CLI has become unusable to this degree recently 😔