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Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

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Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#91

Post by blutoot »

IMHO, one understated downside in today's AI/Agentic/Vibe-coding options is that ALL of them are evolving a bit too fast before any of these types of "best practices" can become a habit with a critical mass of developers, rendering many such tips obsolete very quickly (as another person rightfully pointed out).

Sure, software in general will keep evolving rapidly but the methods and tools to build software need to be relatively more stable. E.g. many languages and frameworks come and go, but how we break down a problem, how we discover and understand codebases, etc. have more or less remained steady (I think).

I see this a paradox and have no idea what the state of equalibrium will look like.

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#92

Post by [deleted] »

lupire wrote: post #70
cjbarber wrote: post #43

Notable re author: “Addy Osmani is an Irish Software Engineer and leader currently working on the Google Chrome web browser and Gemini with Google DeepMind. A developer for 25+ years, he has worked at Google for over thirteen years, focused on making the web low-friction for users and web developers. He is passionate about AI-assisted engineering and developer tools. He previously worked on Fortune 500 sites. Addy is…

He's published 11 books in the past 5 years? Is he using AI assisted writing, too?

[deleted]

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

teiferer wrote: post #90
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative is to view the AI agent as a new developer on your team. If existing guidance + one-shot doesn't work, revisit the documentation and guidance (ie dotMD file), see what's missing, improve it, and try again. Like telling a new engineer "actually, here is how we do this thing". The engineer learns and next time gets it right. I don't do MCPs much because of effort and security risks. But I find the loop a…

> The engineer learns and next time gets it right. Antropomorphizing LLMs like that is the path to madness. That's where all the frustration comes from.

On the contrary; stubborn refusal to anthropomorphize LLMs is where the frustration comes from. To a first approximation, the models are like little people on a chip; the success and failure modes are the same as with talking to people.

If you look, all the good advice and guidelines for LLMs are effectively the same as for human employees - clarity of communication, sufficient context, not distracting with bullshit, information hygiene, managing trust. There are deep reasons for that, and as a rule of thumb, treating LLMs like naive savants gives reliable intuitions for what works, and what doesn't.

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#94

Post by TeMPOraL »

novoreorx wrote: post #66

I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic, so that LLM providers wouldn't bother reinventing their own wheels like Codex and Gemini-CLI. They should be pluggable providers, not independent programs. In this way, the CLI would focus on refining the agentic logic and would grow faster than ever before. Currently Claude Code is the best, but I don't think Anthropic would pivo…

There is Aider (aider.chat), and it has been there for couple years now. Great tool.

Alas, you don't install Claude Code or Gemini CLI for the actual CLI tool. You install it because the only way agentic coding makes sense is through subscription billing at the vendor - SOTA models burns through tokens too fast for pay-per-use API billing to make sense here; we're talking literally a day of basic use costing more than a monthly subscription to the Max plan at $200 or so.

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#95

Post by vidarh »

neural_thing wrote: post #39
vidarh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be an awful many "could" and "might" in that part. Given how awfully limited the Gemini integration inside Google Docs is, it's an area that's just made me feel Google is executing really slowly on this.

I've built a document editor that has AI properly integrated - provides feedback in "Track Changes" mode and actually gives good writing advice. If you've been looking for something like this - https://owleditor.com

It looks nice, but for my use it's very specifically not reviews I want in AI integration with an editor, but to be able to prompt it to write or rewrite large sections, or repeated references to specific things, with minimal additional input. I specifically don't want to go through an approve edit by edit - I'll read through a diff and approve all at once or just tell it how to fix its edits.

Claude at least is more than good enough to do this for dry technical writing (I've not tried it for anything more creative), and so I usually end up using Claude Code to do this with markdown files.

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#98

Post by stavros »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #93
teiferer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The engineer learns and next time gets it right. Antropomorphizing LLMs like that is the path to madness. That's where all the frustration comes from.

On the contrary; stubborn refusal to anthropomorphize LLMs is where the frustration comes from. To a first approximation, the models are like little people on a chip; the success and failure modes are the same as with talking to people. If you look, all the good advice and guidelines for LLMs are effectively the same as for human employees - clarity of communication, sufficient context, not distracting with bullshit,…

Exactly this. People treat LLMs like they treat machines and then are surprised that "LLMs are bad".

The right mental model for working with LLMs is much closer to "person" than to "machine".

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#99

Post by wowamit »

terrywang wrote: post #82
wowamit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't tried complex coding tasks using Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview yet. I reckon it won't be materially different. In my limited testing, I found that Gemini 3 Pro struggles with even simple coding tasks. Sure, I haven't tested complex scenarios yet and have only done so via Antigravity. But it is very difficult to do that with the limited quota it provides. Impressions here - https://dev.amitgawande.com/2025/antigr…

Thanks for sharing, insightful. Personally, I consider Antigravity was a positive & ambitious launch. Initial impression was that there are many rough edges to be smoothed out. I hit many errors like 1. communicating with Gemini (Model-as-a-Service) 2. Agent execution terminated due to errors, etc., but somehow it completed the task (verification/review UX is bad). Pricing for paid plans with AI Pro or Workspace woul…

Interesting. I did not face many issues while communicating with Gemini. But I believe these issues will iron themselves out -- Google does feel to have rushed the launch.

Re: Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

#100

Post by therealmarv »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #94
novoreorx wrote: post #66

I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic, so that LLM providers wouldn't bother reinventing their own wheels like Codex and Gemini-CLI. They should be pluggable providers, not independent programs. In this way, the CLI would focus on refining the agentic logic and would grow faster than ever before. Currently Claude Code is the best, but I don't think Anthropic would pivo…

There is Aider (aider.chat), and it has been there for couple years now. Great tool. Alas, you don't install Claude Code or Gemini CLI for the actual CLI tool. You install it because the only way agentic coding makes sense is through subscription billing at the vendor - SOTA models burns through tokens too fast for pay-per-use API billing to make sense here; we're talking literally a day of basic use costing more tha…

Aider is in a sad state. The maintainer does not "maintain" for quite some time now (look at the open PRs and issues). It's not state of the art definitely but one of the first and best ones in the past. A fork was created, Aider CE, from some members of the Discord community https://github.com/dwash96/aider-ce The fork looks and works promising but there is (sadly) so much more development in the other AI CLI tools nowadays.
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