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Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

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Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#61

Post by fantasizr »

TNWin wrote: post #47

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.

It's been going on for years

https://x.com/tomgara/status/1587640766696140800?lang=en

"It’s pretty simple: Google Meet (original) was previously Meet, which was the rebranded Hangouts Meet. Meet has been merged with Google Duo, which replaced Google Hangouts. Google Duo has been renamed Meet, and Meet has been temporarily named Google Meet (original), for clarity"

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#62

Post by lubujackson »

thecupisblue wrote: post #8

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 thi…

Face it, they have hit the "Yahoo phase" of their company life. It was a good, long run. All that remains is buying larger and larger successful startups and grinding them in to dust.

But the the "sunsetting" of projects good or bad, random shotgun approaches to everything, super awesome islands of product that slowly get bled dry... it is a failure of management structure, not just management.

I don't know the guts of Google, but I imagine there are 500 VPs (or equivalent) each with their pet project, each trying to curry favor with the boss who sent an email blast to "go big on Gemini". It feels like many teams just dropped their old busted projects and moved on to the new hotness, to hell with the customers, consistency or revenue. The only metric now is "Gemini engagement".

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#63

Post by timrogers »

artdigital wrote: post #14
criley2 wrote: post #6

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 ti…

> 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. Yeah that's on you. Add a `copilot-instructions.md` file and configure the `copilot-setup-steps.yml` workflow to se…

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 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.

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#64

Post by grogenaut »

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

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#65

Post by vidarh »

grogenaut wrote: post #64

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 wit…

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

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#66

Post by danudey »

vidarh wrote: post #65
grogenaut wrote: post #64

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 wit…

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

"Take each H1 heading and split that section off into a separate document tab"

A simple but tedious task that I wanted to do for a large document. Nope, Gemini says it can't do that. It offered to tell me HOW to do it though!

Is there something Gemini can actually do that's useful?

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#67

Post by dkdcio »

danudey wrote: post #66
vidarh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Take each H1 heading and split that section off into a separate document tab" A simple but tedious task that I wanted to do for a large document. Nope, Gemini says it can't do that. It offered to tell me HOW to do it though! Is there something Gemini can actually do that's useful?

I did something similar after copy/pasting Markdown into a Google Doc, assuming Gemini could obviously convert the section headers and such…nope!

combined with separate plans to use the Gemini CLI, it’s an incredibly goofy situation

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#68

Post by danudey »

gexla wrote: post #18
thecupisblue wrote: post #8

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 thi…

My take on this is that Google has a bunch of "incubating" spaces where they have teams of people building things that may or may not take off. So, when something does take off, it sort of becomes a victim of its own success. It confuses people because it's not a "core" Google product that fits nicely among other Google products. NotebookLLM seems to be another example. Personally, I would rather Google did this sort…

The teams of people want to get their work out into the public to make a big splash so they can get a sweet bonus before anyone realizes that it's not actually useful or effective. See also: Google Wave, and 80% of their other products.

They don't get a sweet bonus and promotion for helping another team improve a product, so why collaborate? Just create your own chat app according to your own team's vision/goals/available technology and release it and hope it gains more traction than the other teams' existing options.

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#69

Post by overfeed »

artdigital wrote: post #41
barrkel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jules works in a VM, asynchronously, on a separate checkout of the code. Gemini CLI works synchronously with the user (unless you YOLO) and in your own directory on your own machine on your own checkout. Two different modalities.

And Gemini CLI github action (this project) runs again in a VM (github action runner) on a separate checkout of the code. This is what OP meant with multiple coding agents.

> This is what OP meant with multiple coding agents.

It may be the same coding agent behind the GHA. I question the implicit declaration behind OPs critique: that all 160,000+ Google folk should offer a single coding agent to their billions of users (or whatever the TAM is for coding agents). This is akin to criticizing Google Cloud for having VM, Kubernetes clusters and AppEngine; superficially, these products solve the same problem.

FWIW - this Github Actions integration is close to my ideal AI agents workflow[0]. I don't want to metaphorically look over my agents shoulder as it works in a specialized, vendor-locked IDE. I want agents to work asynchronously, taking however long they need, and tackling multiple tasks, with PRs/CLs as the unit of work. Current models may not be up to the task of single-shotting this, but the task is parallelizable across multiple agent-instances & the best solution selected (climate change be damned). I suspect Github alone may not provide adequate context as it may be missing previous tickets and design documents & the back-and-forth on requirements, but it's a start, and I'm glad Google is exploring this path for agents.

0. I believe in this workflow so much I created a proof-of-concept project that reads tickets from Vikunja and creates PRs using Aider some weeks back.

Re: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions

#70

Post by danudey »

thecupisblue wrote: post #19
gexla wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on this is that Google has a bunch of "incubating" spaces where they have teams of people building things that may or may not take off. So, when something does take off, it sort of becomes a victim of its own success. It confuses people because it's not a "core" Google product that fits nicely among other Google products. NotebookLLM seems to be another example. Personally, I would rather Google did this sort…

That is so, but the problem this causes is more than just customer confusion - it is a lack of integration and responsibility. There is no "let's polish this and see if it works based on real user feedback", but it's "let's throw this out and shut it down if it doesn't work". And if it isn't shut down, it is left in that terrible half-documented state, with confusing integrations and terribly integrated into the rest…

If they throw it out and it's great then they get accolades; if they throw it out and it's bad, they don't. If they polish it and see if it works based on real user feedback then they also don't but it took longer. Better to just throw everything at the wall the instant it has the potential to go viral and then move on if it doesn't.

Remember that Google operates at huge scale, so even something any other company would consider wildly successful (e.g. Reader) is a waste of resources for them. That means that if you're ramping up your product over the course of a year you're wasting time and money. Go big or go home.

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