Gemini CLI

Google publishes Gemini CLI, a command-line interface for AI interaction whose stated advantages are a massive context window and, in 2025, no cost.

A Reddit post from 23 June 2025 describes the resulting pattern most explicitly: run Gemini CLI non-interactively with gemini -p and the @ syntax to feed it single files, whole directories or an entire project, then hand the output to Claude Code. The reasoning is a division of labour. Gemini CLI ingests large codebases but is slower and weaker at following precise instructions and using tools; Claude Code produces better plans and code inside a tighter context window. A commenter, u/casce, wrote bash functions piping the output into Claude Code as a hidden system message. Others pushed the idea toward MCP servers.

Marco Mornati, reporting a one-day BMAD experiment on 14 March 2026, made the same arithmetic: Gemini CLI for the exploratory phase, costlier tokens held back for development itself.

Google announced Conductor on 17 December 2025, an extension that stores specifications and plans as Markdown files inside the codebase and drives them through /conductor:setup, /conductor:newTrack and /conductor:implement. It is downloadable on GitHub.

The terms of service documentation dated 17 April 2025 pulls the other way. With a Google account on Gemini Code Assist for Individuals, or an unpaid Developer API key, prompts, responses and associated code are collected and may be used for model training; Standard/Enterprise, paid and Vertex AI paths treat them as confidential. The free tier that makes Gemini CLI attractive for bulk reading is the tier that keeps what it reads.