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Google's CLI Weapon? [Tool Spotlight]

Google Gemini CLI brings Gemini directly into developers’ terminals

Author

Himanshu Ramchandani
July 05, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Master the AI tool as an AI Leader. In today’s newsletter, I added a new series for AI leaders, Tool Spotlight, a lightning knowledge of new AI tools or frameworks.

I am starting a new live cohort of AI Engineer HQ this July 23rd, 2025.

Join Now Here. Few Seats only.

In today’s edition:

  • AI Roundup— learning resources, news on RAG, Edge devices, and Gemma 3n

  • Dive Deep Drill— How Google's CLI Tool Makes You 10x More Productive?

  • Build Together— Here’s How I Can Help You

The Elite —Build your second brain for Leading AI Products/Projects.

1:1 Coaching Program

AI Roundup

I found these resources, content, and news this week.

What’s Hot / Editor’s Pick

— Microsoft is quietly replacing developers with AI, and the layoffs are just beginning

— Runway’s generative AI tools will soon let you create video games with a few prompts

— China hosts first fully autonomous AI robot football match

Learning Resources

— [YouTube] Context Engineering, 12-Factor Agents
— [YouTube] Google’s new CLI tool hits different - by Fireship

— [YouTube] AI 2027: A Realistic Scenario of AI Takeover

Funding & Startup Highlights

— Anduril $30.5 billion valuation (Series G) for AI-powered defense systems
— Thinking Machines Lab $2 billion seed round
— Scale AI Meta Invests $14 Billion In Scale AI To Strengthen Model Training

What did you find most interesting this week?

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Dive Deep Drill

How Google's CLI Tool Makes You 10x More Productive? [Tool Spotlight]

If you’re building AI products or leading a dev team, you’ve probably heard of Gemini — Google’s flagship family of generative AI models.

But there’s a new way to use it that’s getting attention fast, Gemini CLI.

This isn’t just another chatbot in a browser.

It’s a full AI agent that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, connects to the internet, and gets real work done.

Best part? It’s free.

Let’s break it down.

What is Gemini CLI?

Image from GitHub

Gemini CLI is an open-source AI command-line agent powered by Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro model.

It’s like giving your terminal an upgrade, with an AI assistant that can:

  • understand and modify your code

  • connect to internal tools and APIs

  • analyze entire projects (yes, full repos)

  • fetch real-time information using built-in search

  • run in automation pipelines (non-interactive mode)

You can ask it to find bugs, fix authentication flows, or explain legacy logic, and it will do it.

Why AI Leaders Should Care?

This tool isn’t just for individual devs hacking on side projects.

It has big implications for engineering leaders and product teams.

Why?

  • it can handle 1 million tokens (that’s enough to read and reason through your whole codebase at once)

  • it has built-in access to Google Search (it can pull current information instead of relying on outdated model training)

  • with model context protocol [MCP] (you can plug Gemini CLI into internal tools and make it aware of your systems)

  • use it inside scripts and workflows to automate parts of your CI/CD or devops processes

This is what “AI-powered development” actually looks like in practice, not just fancy demos.

A Quick Hands-On

Getting started is simple. [Gemini CLI GitHub]

You’ll need Node.js installed: 

npm install -g @google/gemini-cli gemini

Log in with your Google account and start chatting.

Here are a few things you can try:

  • analyze your codebase 

> Analyze this project and tell me about potential security issues

  • fix a real bug 

> The login flow is broken. Find the bug and fix it across files.

  • summarize documents or code 

> Summarize the logic in auth_service.js and list functions used

And you get 1,000 requests per day for free.

That’s more than most paid plans offer.

Learn AI Engineering with me at the Headquarters.

Things To Keep In Mind

  • your code is being sent to an external model

  • devs will need to learn how to work with AI agents [AI Training for Team Brainstorm with me]

  • it’s not a full replacement for IDEs or review tools, but adds a layer of support your team hasn’t had before

The Real Opportunity

Here’s the strategic angle I observed.

Google is giving away what competitors charge $200/month for.

That’s not a typo, and it’s not just generosity.

It’s a land grab.

But for you and I, that’s a win.

Smaller teams now get enterprise-level tools.

Startups can build faster.

Larger teams can focus on higher-level design, not boilerplate code.

If you’re leading AI or software development, this is the kind of shift you don’t want to miss.

Start small.

Run a one-month trial with a team.

Track bug resolution time, dev satisfaction, and review cycles.

Gemini CLI is a glimpse into the future of AI-augmented engineering.

Want to work together? Here’s How I Can Help You

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Paper Unfold

A series in which you will get a breakdown of complex research papers into easy-to-understand pointers. If you missed the previous ones:

New Cohort starting this 23rd July 2025, 7 PM IST.

Join Now Here. Few Seats only.

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