Why is everyone saying this is so great?

[sruckh]

gemini-cli wiped my entire codebase trying to suppress a warning message. When it jacks up behind all repairs, it goes into the corner and hides. Both times it has turned code into a complete mess, and I have asked it to stop working on the feature branch and pull from the remote repo, but it has completely stopped responding. It thinks for about a minute, does nothing, and returns to the chat prompt. I don't get the hype, as this has failed on multiple occasions and seems to completely ignore the GEMINI.md file. I give it strict commands not to push stuff to git without permission, and it does it anyway. I ask it to use git instead of gh, and again totally ignores it. Once it goes off the rails, it is a complete joke. It blows through the number of requests in a minute, trying to recover from its mistakes. My experience so far is that this is not reliable and cannot be trusted with even the simplest of tasks.

[mattKorwel]

Hey @sruckh I'm one of the CLI maintainers. I agree, there are totally times when Gemini totally gets lost and confused, sorry that it hosed your stuff. That's not cool. We're actively working to make this better. If you don't mind, tell me more about your specific scenarios feel free to email me if you prefer, mattkorwel at Google dot com.

If you could do /about and drop your version info on which method you are using to authenticate?

I'm most interested in I gave it strict commands not to push anything to git and it did anyway. That would be a total no-go, would love to track that down. When it prompts you to allow a git operation, which option did you select? yes, always, no?

Thanks for trying out our new CLI, let's get it working as good as we can for you.

[orchidfire]

Amazing so far for me. 1 week in. Any LLM can go off the rails thats normal. But its also how you use it. Tame the dragon so to speak. And you shall conquer land. Some tips: Keep files small, reset context if it bugs out, do things in chunks, careful with being too ambitious in your prompts. And a lots more. Agentic coding is a skill atm. You have to learn the gotchas. Its not automagic. But very magic once you get the hang of it.

[T9es]

Amazing so far for me. 1 week in. Any LLM can go off the rails thats normal. But its also how you use it. Tame the dragon so to speak. And you shall conquer land. Some tips: Keep files small, reset context if it bugs out, do things in chunks, careful with being too ambitious in your prompts. And a lots more. Agentic coding is a skill atm. You have to learn the gotchas. Its not automagic. But very magic once you get the hang of it.

Basically this. If you know how to prompt it, what to tell it, what info to show it, it will do most of the stuff by itself. As with any LLM model, the more specific and the more info you give it, the more it will actually help. The only caveat for now is the CLI switching to the flash model, which sucks at coding and does wild mistakes.

As for it ignoring your request, how much context did it fill up before you asked it to do so? Anything above 150k or 200k context starts going off the rails from what I've seen. Maybe you had conflicting instructions for it, let's say when it fell into a loop and started filling up its own context? You'd need to provide specifics of what how and when everything happened.

[goktug7913]

nothing made gemini-cli usable for me. This is not the CLI's problem. Gemini models behave exactly the same in other agentic frameworks. In Cursor, the same looping problem happens and failing to apply the simplest of diffs after just 5k 10k used context.

It's exactly the same issues, gemini 2.5 pro falls into loops less, but both pro and flash are literally unusable beyond asking questions. They can't behave agentically. There was a point where gemini exp 2.5 felt like the best model. Then sonnet 4 and o3 got released and something happened to the gemini weights. It's literally worse than 8b models right now.

[rafczow]

Im having a great success with it so far. Here is how do I work with gemini:

1. Keep the context small (relatively)
   Im not asking it to understand whole codebase but only small part of it that im currently working on. This can be a single module, few files that work together to deliver some functionality, etc.

2. Give direction
   Not only ask It to fix some problem or generate a code but suggest what you expect. I had few situations where agent solved the problem but used the simplest way - no clean code, OOP rules etc. Now I usually will first think about potential solution and laid out some high level standards asking Gemini to work on it or suggest me even better way.

3. Divide the task
   You would not ask a developers to just 'fix the whole project', but instead create separate tickets/stories/epics and work through them one by one. The same goes here but I would sometimes go even more granular and split each problem again into small adjustments that together will provide full solution.

[felixreed]

Just discovered that using the Gemini API in conjunction with the Roo Code extension gives much better results, so this is most likely an issue with the CLI, although Gemini has its own outstanding issues as well.

[T9es]

It's honestly so weird seeing people have issues with gemini. There's a lot of people with good results and there's people who don't get any results at all. I wonder what's the statistic on that.

Also, be careful with the API, especially if you intend on paying. I used the API for about 20 minutes and it ate 50$ worth of API calls (the pro model). Even the free api from AI Studio ate up real money, when in reality it was supposed to stop after the limit was reached.

[jackwotherspoon]

We appreciate all the feedback here! This is the value of open-source 👏

Team is working hard as mentioned by @mattKorwel and we are actively looking to make the experience with Gemini CLI better.

Going to convert this thread to a discussion as it more of a question and discussion thread.