Google Gemini CLI

Gemini CLI arrived as one of the most quietly influential developer tools of its generation: an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed agent that dropped Gemini models straight into the terminal, with file operations, shell execution, web fetching, Google Search grounding and MCP support for custom integrations. Roughly 107,000 GitHub stars and 14,700 forks — most of them earned in little over a year — tell you how hard it landed with developers who wanted an agentic coding assistant without leaving the shell.

The problem is that the version most people knew is gone. Google announced on May 19, 2026 that it was folding its terminal experience into the new Antigravity CLI, and on June 18, 2026 Gemini CLI stopped serving requests for free users and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers (the same change hit the Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions and the GitHub integration). What remains is a tool for a much narrower audience: organizations on Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise licenses, Google Cloud customers, and anyone wiring it up with paid Gemini or Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform API keys. Google says development continues in the open on GitHub and that it will track new model releases, which is more than most deprecated tools get.

Judged on its technical merits, Gemini CLI is still a strong piece of engineering. A 1M-token context window is genuinely useful for whole-repository reasoning, MCP support means it plugs into bespoke toolchains rather than boxing you in, and the permissive Apache 2.0 license makes it forkable and auditable in a way its closed-source successor reportedly is not. Continued open development is a meaningful commitment.

But a developer tool is only as good as its access path, and that is where the rating falls apart. The free tier — 60 requests per minute and 1,000 per day on a personal Google account, which was the single most compelling thing about this tool — no longer exists. Individual developers and hobbyists who adopted it have been pushed onto a different product with a different architecture, and the migration to Antigravity CLI (Go-based, asynchronous background workflows, Agent Skills, Hooks, Subagents and renamed plugins) means the thing you learn here is not entirely the thing you will use next.

One honest caveat: pricing is not part of the information we have, so we can't assess value for money on the paid and enterprise routes that remain, and some details of the deprecation timeline come from a lower-confidence secondary report. What we can say confidently is this: if you already run Gemini CLI on an enterprise license or an API key, it remains a capable, well-supported agent worth keeping. If you're evaluating it fresh as an individual in 2026, you are evaluating a tool that has been superseded — start with Antigravity CLI instead. The score below reflects a good product on a dead-end path, not a bad one.