Wait, is this CLI or is this a github action or is this a github application? …

> I tried to do a basic thing (add a service account) in Google Cloud recently, which wasn't allowed due to default rules that are deprecated and are so confusing to change due to their confusing UX. Similarly I tried contacting some human support for billing issues but was denied because automated checks deemed me unworthy for consulting anything besides documentation pages which i didn't understood so i gave up and switched to another cloud provider.

> because they are all over the place and spreading themselves thin Well, they do have a lot to spread. But yeah, intense amount of overlap.

> Even thought they have access to my Google Account and my phone, their Gemini app is useless. This is the funniest thing to me. When you open the app, Gemini says: "Hello, Vasco" In the welcome screen. I then ask this amazing intelligence this question: "What's my name?" "I do not know your name. I am an AI and I don't have access to your personal information." I know why it happens, but it's so funny.

And this can't authenticate the same way the normal gemini cli does, it needs an API key from the looks of it, so free, standard and enterprise plans through OAuth currently don't work for authentication, just the free tier of the Google AI Studio, which is different than gemini-cli free tier, and has way tighter rate limits.

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 of experimentation even if it is more confusing. Or I could be wrong about this. But following NotebookLLM, it seemed like the team developing it had a lot of autonomy.

gemini-cli is a command line tool that calls Gemini and shells out to common text utilities and MCP for tool use. This appears to just be a plugin where you do things on GitHub, that sends out notifications to gemini-cli running on cloud, then gemini-cli responds and sends notifications back. Basically just saving you the hassle of cloning at a specific commit, calling gemini-cli manually, and then uploading the result manually.

They need a boundary between their research culture and their software culture. One org, two cultures. The chaos you describe is actually a significant positive in research environments. It's not spreading oneself thin, it is diversifying and decorrelating ones' efforts. You can't centrally plan all innovation. But for the interface between the customer and the research output, which is a software and product problem, that definitely needs a different approach.

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.