Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#41

Post by kaycey2022 »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #7

I've had a pretty poor experience with Gemini. I've had to convince it to do things it should just be able to do but thinks it can't for some reason. Like reading from a file outside of the project directory- it can do it fine, but refuses to unless you convince it that no it actually can. Also has inserted "\n" instead of newlines on a number of occasions. I'd argue these behaviors are much more important than being…

Gemini CLI is definitely a much worse client than some of the other agent clients like opencode, cursor etc. But from my experience, that isn't because of the model quality. I get better quality responses from the gemini web chat interface than chatgpt, claude etc.

Of course my experience is anecdotal, but we hardly have any decent benchmarks to compare these models. I suspect most benchmarks have leaked into training sets, rendering them useless anyway.

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#42

Post by michaelbuckbee »

heeen2 wrote: post #39

I made a mcp that would use a pty lib to allow claude to debug a TUI app I was writing with ok-ish results. ultimately I wanted to see what was happening myself so when I need interactive I just tell it to use tmux-cli to capture the neighboring pane. https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/blob/main/do... maybe turning that into a mcp with more guardrails and integrated guide to the agent would make it more…

I'm not actually sure about that (that turning it into an MCP would help). I've seen more momentum building around having better cli tool integration with ClaudeCode than MCP reliance.

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#43

Post by OJFord »

kaycey2022 wrote: post #41
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #7

I've had a pretty poor experience with Gemini. I've had to convince it to do things it should just be able to do but thinks it can't for some reason. Like reading from a file outside of the project directory- it can do it fine, but refuses to unless you convince it that no it actually can. Also has inserted "\n" instead of newlines on a number of occasions. I'd argue these behaviors are much more important than being…

Gemini CLI is definitely a much worse client than some of the other agent clients like opencode, cursor etc. But from my experience, that isn't because of the model quality. I get better quality responses from the gemini web chat interface than chatgpt, claude etc. Of course my experience is anecdotal, but we hardly have any decent benchmarks to compare these models. I suspect most benchmarks have leaked into trainin…

Also people don't talk enough about (or are bad at separating themselves) the model vs. the client tool - e.g. from your comment maybe using codex/Claude Code/aider with Gemini API would be better, best even, but people rarely make that comparison or separation, it's always 'Claude Code with Claude vs. codex with GPT-x' etc.

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#44

Post by greymalik »

theshrike79 wrote: post #20
caymanjim wrote: post #17

The best thing about this is that now Claude and Codex have to add it.

I’m still waiting for Gemini to add hooks and sub-agents

They will do it with needlessly complexity that is out of step with the competition, as they did with slash commands (toml) and extensions (skills-equivalent).

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#45

Post by harlequinetcie »

How many people are running LLMs CLIs instead of using their APIs? It seems so obnoxious to me that using a CLI command is cheaper than using their APIs, hence forcing them to build these kind of work arounds.

Maybe I'm not getting it right, but it seems there are two competing paradigms which certainly with llms coding for llms, who cares.

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#46

Post by theknarf »

thallavajhula wrote: post #29

Aside: The demo shows git commands being run in the CLI. I absolutely hate it when devs use a commit message that says "chore: my first commit from gemini cli" - I get that it's meant for the demo, but in general too, I've seen codebases that enforce these commit prefixes such as "chore", "feat", "bugfix" etc. Is there any real value to that? Besides wasting up the 50 character limit on the first line of the commit m…

If you manage a product that releases changelogs then by tagging commits that way you can automatically group changes into headers like that when generating your changelog from your git history. It's fairly common in open source projects. If you however are working on some internal stuff at a company, and you don't generate changelogs from your commits then doing conventional commits isn't that useful.

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#47

Post by lherron »

Building an interactive shell inside their CLI seems like a very odd technical solution. I can’t think of any use case where the same context gathering couldn’t be gleaned by examining the file/system state after the session ended, but maybe I’m missing something.

On the other hand, now that I’ve read this, I can see how having some hooks between the code agent CLIs and ghostty/etc could be extremely powerful.

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#48

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

sunaookami wrote: post #15
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #7

I've had a pretty poor experience with Gemini. I've had to convince it to do things it should just be able to do but thinks it can't for some reason. Like reading from a file outside of the project directory- it can do it fine, but refuses to unless you convince it that no it actually can. Also has inserted "\n" instead of newlines on a number of occasions. I'd argue these behaviors are much more important than being…

Gemini doesn't seem to be trained on tool use (which Claude is) so it quiet often thinks it can't do something it certainly can and does a lot of nonsense. For me it fails nearly everytime while it's trying to read project files because it uses relative paths instead of absolute so I've put "For your "ReadFile" and "WriteFile" tool, you MUST use absolute paths to files" in my system instructions. Speaking of system i…

> Speaking of system instructions, Gemini always forgets them or doesn't follow them. And it still puts code comments nearly everywhere, it drives me nuts.

Yup, I've tried to use Gemini so many times, but the lack of being able to strictly follow system prompts makes it so hard to get useful stuff out of it that doesn't need to be cleaned out. Code comments is short of impossible to get rid of, they must have trained it with only code that has comments, because the model really likes to add them everywhere.

Every agent+model combination has issues right now, I'm personally swapping between them depending on the task.

Gemini is great for stuff you need fast and don't care about the quality, as you can just throw it away.

Claude Code + Sonnet is great in many ways and follows prompts way better, but has a tendency to go off on tangents and really get lost in the woods. It requires handholding and basically interrupt it as soon as you see something weird, to steer it in the right direction. Complex stuff has to be aggressively split into smaller validated sub-tasks manually. Tends to also stop continuing by itself to say "Well, we've done half now, you want me to continue with the other half?"

Codex + GPT-5is the best at following prompts, produces the highest quality code, but is way slower than others, and still struggles with seemingly arbitrary stuff yet able to solve complex tasks by itself without any hand-holding. It can get stuck on something obvious, but at least it won't run off on it's own and it'll complete everything as well as it can, even if it takes 30 minutes.

Qwen Coder seems outright unusable and haven't been able to use it for anything good at all.

Tried AMP for a while as well, nice UI and model seems good, but too expensive (and I say this as someone who currently gives $200/month to OpenAI).

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#49

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

theshrike79 wrote: post #21
sunaookami wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini doesn't seem to be trained on tool use (which Claude is) so it quiet often thinks it can't do something it certainly can and does a lot of nonsense. For me it fails nearly everytime while it's trying to read project files because it uses relative paths instead of absolute so I've put "For your "ReadFile" and "WriteFile" tool, you MUST use absolute paths to files" in my system instructions. Speaking of system i…

Codex doesn’t give feedback while it’s running. It just works quietly in a way that’s not easy to interrupt if you could see it going off the rails. Claude is better at this.

Set these in the config.toml for codex and you'll get a lot more info while it's running:

    model_reasoning_summary = "detailed"
    model_verbosity = "high"
    model_supports_reasoning_summaries = true
    show_raw_agent_reasoning = true

Re: Run interactive commands in Gemini CLI

#50

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

lherron wrote: post #47

Building an interactive shell inside their CLI seems like a very odd technical solution. I can’t think of any use case where the same context gathering couldn’t be gleaned by examining the file/system state after the session ended, but maybe I’m missing something. On the other hand, now that I’ve read this, I can see how having some hooks between the code agent CLIs and ghostty/etc could be extremely powerful.

LLMs in general struggles with numbers, it's easy to tell with the medium sized models that struggle with line replacement commands where it has to count, it usually takes a couple of tries to get right.

I always imagined they'd have an easier time if they could start a vim instance and send search/movement/insert commands instead, not having to keep track of numbers and do calculations, but instead visually inspect the right thing happening.

I haven't tried this new feature yet, but that was the first thing that came to mind when seeing it, it might be easier for LLMs to do edits this way.

Post reply on HN