Link parkin’, from Addy Osmani: Gemini CLI Tips & Tricks
This guide covers ~30 pro-tips for effectively using Gemini CLI for agentic coding
Gemini CLI is an open-source AI assistant that brings the power of Google’s Gemini model directly into your terminal. It functions as a conversational, “agentic” command-line tool - meaning it can reason about your requests, choose tools (like running shell commands or editing files), and execute multi-step plans to help with your development workflow.
In practical terms, Gemini CLI acts like a supercharged pair programmer and command-line assistant. It excels at coding tasks, debugging, content generation, and even system automation, all through natural language prompts. Before diving into pro tips, let’s quickly recap how to set up Gemini CLI and get it running.
Tip 16 on integrating shell interaction seems particularly handy. Seems like all the other CLI tools have this in one form or another, but this tip is a good discussion of the utility of the feature.
Previously, I found Gemini CLI to be less effective than Claude Code. Just last week, Google had a raft of AI announcements, including a batch of agentic coding upgrades connected to Gemini CLI.
Gemini 3 Pro is now available in Gemini CLI
We’ve integrated Gemini 3 Pro, our most intelligent model, directly into Gemini CLI to unlock a new level of performance and productivity in the terminal. This powerful combination delivers state-of-the-art reasoning for executing better commands, enhances support for complex engineering work through agentic coding, and enables smarter, more tailored workflows via advanced tool use.
It’s probably time to revisit Gemini CLI, although the passel of agentic coding CLI tools is getting hard to keep track of.
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