Wait, is this CLI or is this a github action or is this a github application?

Also, I thought Jules was the "coding agent" they are working on. Now this is taking it over or is this like another case of Google self-competing?

Someone needs to take charge at this company with a strong vision, because they are all over the place and spreading themselves thin, which in turn spreads thin the customer/brand equity.

At this point, as someone who: - Has been writing Android code for about 13 years now

- Has collaborated with Google on stuff

- Lead Google developer communities and conferences

- Knows many, many GDE's and has discussions with them often

- Uses Gemini API for their product

I'm so damn confused. How is a normal customer expected to understand then?

- They have 2 SDK's for communicating to their Gemini API.

- The documentation is spread and thrown all over the place.

- Half the time I'm trying to do something I have to dig through their code to find how to.

- The features I really want are rate limited or available only to private testers.

- They have 3 coding agents now.

- Even thought they have access to my Google Account and my phone, their Gemini app is useless.

- I tried to do a basic thing (add a service account) in Google Cloud recently, which wasn't allowed due to default rules that are deprecated and are so confusing to change due to their confusing UX.

The only usable thing is the AI studio, which is a great tool for experimenting with diff models and improved the DX of getting a Gemini API key by a mile.

I'd say congrats on the release, but honestly this is such a mid low hanging fruit of a product.

I understand Google feels they need to compete in coding AI. The crazy thing to me is:

- Gemini can't make me a calendar appointment between myself and another person for 30 minutes in the next week. Heck it can't make appointments yet. - it can't edit or collaborate on Google docs, just insert. I edit my docs in cline or Claude code as markdown and upload. - speaking of, I don't think they have a MCP for working with docs or sheets - Gemini is worse than a Google search at helping me with sheet formulas

There's all these unique places in googles ecosystem I feel they could/should be excelling at AI at. They're not.

Hell I noticed yesterday searching for my remarkable preorder from years ago that you can't exact string search Gmail anymore. Searching for remarkable was pulling up "amazing". They're just degrading all of their products to stupidity at a time when I and AI can use more powertools

The amount of time I have to spend on investigations, to understand the basics of what something ACTUALLY IS, never ceases to amaze me. Having to scrape away buzzwords, ill-conceived descriptions, and unnecessary verbose stuff... it's tiresome.

So i THINK this is what it IS:

A GitHub Action that can be included in GitHub workflow YAML files. It executes the Gemini CLI, passing in prompts, repo context, and event data (like issue text or PR diffs) to generate responses or perform actions. In other words: it's a wrapper that installs and runs the Gemini CLI inside GitHub Actions environments.

It can use GitHub's API (via tokens or apps) to read repo data (issues, PRs, code) and write back (e.g., add labels, comments, or code suggestions). It makes calls to standard HTTPS API endpoints for Gemini LLM" (via the CLI's backend interactions with Google's Gemini API)

> 7. Google One and Ultra plans, Gemini for Workspace plans These plans currently apply only to the use of Gemini web-based products provided by Google-based experiences (for example, the Gemini web app or the Flow video editor). These plans do not apply to the API usage which powers the Gemini CLI. Supporting these plans is under active consideration for future support.

Again, with the complicated subscription. Please just give us a monthly subscription for developers that I can pay whatever, and then use Gemini CLI, this github action, Gemini chat, Jules, etc. Just like Claude and their max subscription.

This would be a game changer for me.

Sorry, congrats on the release too. This looks cool!

I find their image text for the third image in the carousel funny:

> Delegate work with an "@ mini-cli" tag and the agent can complete a range of tasks, from writing bugs to fixing bugs

I wonder why they call this `gemini cli`, it's not really a CLI anymore when it's primarily used through GitHub, is it?

Why not follow Claude Code naming with this and just call it `gemini github action` or `run gemini`?

Curious to try this against the Github (website) Agent. The website Agent is definitely dumber than the vscode agent (because it has to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to build and start my monorepo apps) but on the flip side, it doesn't take up my computer and thus any value it creates is additive.

We have tried out Gemini code review vs Copilot code review and Gemini is consistently offering better code review tips. It has officially caught multiple potential bugs, even a few that reviewers might have missed, so it's definitely been additive.

Observability looks way worse. Github Agent has a full UX built into the Github PR that lets you dig into the agent behavior. This requires you to egress text logs and make sense of it yourself.

Also curious about customization. Github just rolled out "agent writes its own instructions" https://github.blog/changelog/2025-08-06-copilot-coding-agen... which is super cool, how do I customize this one and teach it how to start and manage apps across my monorepo?

Last year, I was actually working on a bounty platform for Github PR's.

The low quality human-authored PR's that came in (due to the incentive we offered) combined with the fact that a draft PR could be made for pennies with AI made this concept dead in the water as far as I'm concerned.

The pain point of getting some attention and action on your opensource codebase is really no longer relevant, in fact the pain point seems to be moving to how to optimize the limited reviewer / maintainer bandwidth under the onslaught of proposed suggestions.

To this end I've been experimenting with a framework that builds PR's from the major agents and but with a focus on how to structure the tasks and review process that optimize the review => accept/revise cycle. If you're interested I've been writing up some case studies here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...

Given the amount of setup required, this seems like a very high-friction version of the GitHub Copilot Agent that's already available for every user who could interact with this.

The Gemini assistant will need to be several times better than the existing tools to even fractionally displace them.

It seems too good to be true that this is free, unless training data is the price we'll end up paying with. Also there is no option to opt-out which is all the more sinister. I guess it should be used with caution in private/internal repos.

We’ve been having really good results with Copilot Agent. Sometimes we have to close a PR and refine the issue or pull down and work locally on cursor but it also jumpstarts a lot of stuff.

Not a fan of agents that require and can’t function without access to your GitHub repository. They should be local first.

This sounds like Gemini Code Assist rebranded under the successful Gemini CLI banner. I'm sure this was done to "consolidate" offerings and brands, but this is just way more confusing. CLI has a meaning, and this doesn't seem to have a CLI at all? Product looks cool, but the naming is just baffling

Maybe a skill issue, but I've tried using Gemini 2.5 Pro in Cursor several times, and each time it is an abundance of thinking and very little (often incorrect) actions. Claude Sonnet is cheaper and much more effective for me.

Having a hard time imagining the GHA integration will be much different.

The setup for this is So confusing. I had cursor bugbot (and copilot, but that's github themselves) where it was just a few clicks. Here it's a command line tool you can install in github but you also need a google cloud project?

I tried this out last month. It was useful to summarize big PR's, and even found minor issues. But nothing really useful for professionals, only for overworked open source maintainers to review and feedback newbies.

Sorry to be blunt, but Google needs a better Product Marketing team.

As an engineering manager with an AI budget, I'm always looking for better and cheaper tools.

I have a decade of engineering experience and consider myself fairly intelligent.

I still can't figure out what this is, who it's for, or how much it costs.

Isn't there not a trademark issue over naming it Gemini CLI GitHub Actions?

As Microsoft own GitHub and it's a competitor.

> "no cost"

so the agents you spawn don't use paid Gemini tokens?

I'm just here for the PR review feature

I may not have fully grasped this, but on the surface, it looks like they want me to have an AI agents inserted directly into my git workflow...like right there with all my wonderful juicy code? Is that correct?

Isn't this a recipe for disaster, or is all the FUD around agents wrecking havoc getting to me? I love Claude Code, but it can be somewhat bonkers and is at least at arms length from doing any real damage to my code (assuming I'm following good dev practices, and don't let it loose on my wider filesystem).

I’ve actually been using Gemini on my phone to create appointments from details on my screen. For example, I have a delivery coming so there is an email with the date and time range. I can press and hold my power button and Gemini pops up. I press a button to use screen context. Then say, "put this in my calendar". Then it does. It isn’t perfect. Events that cross multiple days or odd location details in the description sometimes don’t get included. But that is more and more rare. I’m using an Android phone. So maybe that is why it seems to work. I do see that "mostly works" is not the same as "always works".

Also, if you are a Google Workspace customer, you can connect your workspace to the Gemini web app. It can then search and manipulate your calendar and your drive. It will also summarize documents and a few other tasks. I have less use for this but it is far from "it _can’t_ make appointments".

I think Google doesn’t turn Gemini loose on docs the same reason Apple doesn’t turn AI loose on your phone. It’s just not reliable enough to let 99.99% of the world use it. Those of us on the bleeding edge have been fine tweaking and working with inconsistencies. If you put a lot of work in, you get a productivity boost. Think of the family member you are “tech support” for. (You know who you are) would you recommend that to them? Yeah. Me neither.

> Heck it can't make appointments yet. - it can't edit or collaborate on Google docs, just insert.

I'm sure it's capable of doing those things, but they have it turned off because of the significant risks involved in automatically editing important documents like that.

I 100% agree with this, and there are just _so many use cases_ that are small and useful like this.

Heck, just yesterday my partner forgot the grocery list printout so I took a picture of it and asked gemini to convert it to a format where I could copy and paste it to a specific todo list app that was already shared with her. INSTEAD, Gemini dumped the list into Google Keep, albeit with terrible formatting. Didn't miss a single item, but did not recognize categories of item (produce vs frozen food, for example)

So my read on it is there's a lot of "rough around the edges" use cases which can be tidied with better prompting/context or just Gemini team prioritizing those things when they get around to it.

What they actually _need_ is a marketing team showing off useful applications of the releases more often. OpenAI is ALL OVER TIKTOK and people I meet under 30 on that platform don't even know gemini exists. In my experience, Gemini is better than chatGPT at everything you need to do, and it can do the things that the OpenAI marketing people are constantly showing off on TikTok.

Yeah, I figured I'd try Gemini for Google Docs, but given how restricted it is, why would I?

I tried Gemini for gDrive to find some files and it was useless.

I tried it in Slides to generate some slides from text, it was useless.

I tried having it produce a plot for me in Sheets and it was useless. (It does look up documentation but I could already do that.)

I haven't found any useful feature for it in Google Workplace; but I do get AI summaries of everything now, which I don't need and have to keep dismissing.

I haven't yet used it in Google Docs -- it's probably decent there for writing.

Could not agree more. Trying to use Veo3 via genai/vertexai sdks has been full of dead ends, broken specs, and confusion. Good ole curl seems to work though.

There's a need for better indexing. Seems like they switched search to pure embeddings and it doesn't work. Making performant hybrid search is hard in the sense that you cannot combine indexes. Ideally something like embedding, text match and quality vector. I had PoC that worked great when using those but making it scale is hard with reasonable latency.

If something like this exist please educate me as this would make tons of products better.

Totally agree. It’s so surprising that I spent almost an hour trying to figure out how to make Gemini collaborate with me on a Google Document as a kind of artifact. I was sure I was just holding it wrong. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a feature. Even when I gave up I was still unsure if maybe my account isn’t on the right tier or something.

I have a well documented copilot-instructions.md (and have used githubs new agentic self-documentation prompt) and the reality is that it takes about 15-20 minutes to build and start multiple react, reactnative and expressjs projects.

Github now appears to support defining setup tasks in a Github Action that runs prior to the agent, so that's the next avenue of research.

Regardless, the website agent will always be slower. My local is already running and fully ready to go so the ide agent can hit the ground running on any task. The website agent has to spin up a machine and install and build. It will take time.

Tim from the GitHub Copilot coding agent product team here!

@artdigital is on the money here. Our quick tip for beginners is to use `copilot-instructions.md` (which we can now generate for you <3), but for more serious use, we'd strongly recommend adding `copilot-setup-steps.yml`.

That gets you a deterministic setup - and for many teams, it'll be easy, as you can just copy and paste from existing Actions workflows.