Now Open for Building: Introducing Gemini CLI Extensions
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
blog.googleTechstory
skepticalmixed
Debate
70/100
Gemini CLIAI-Powered Development ToolsDeveloper Productivity
Key topics
Gemini CLI
AI-Powered Development Tools
Developer Productivity
Google introduces Gemini CLI extensions, allowing developers to customize and extend the tool's functionality, but the community is divided on its value and security.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
2h
Peak period
30
0-12h
Avg / period
8.8
Comment distribution44 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 44 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 8, 2025 at 10:13 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 8, 2025 at 12:39 PM EDT
2h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
30 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 13, 2025 at 10:25 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45516426Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:09:11 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
It's more the agentic stuff, and things specific to the gemini-cli, which is behind the alternatives in features and capabilities. It was also making an insane number of requests (>1000 in a day, which is about the same as my Copilot usage for a month), but I'm sure they are doing their accounting differently. Google has tried to do AI accounting differently, but has acquiesced to counting tokens instead of chars, fingers crossed they do here to instead of being a snowflake that takes more effort to align in comparisons
I can't stand the cutesiness they've embedded into it either. I don't want that in a work tool
My general sense is that ai-clis will lose out to IDE integrations. I'd prefer a single tool and experience over having to context switch. Putting my AI partner in the same tool and env I use is better than having it separate with hacks to make it seem like it can be in there too, only sorta not quite
Take even the Gemini Web App... what set Google apart in the early days? Search was just an input box, no clutter or calls to action. They have recently decided to break from this (they did have it clean beforehand) and try to get me to use image generation and other calls to action. Please get rid of the slop before I can even make my own slop!
and don't egg me on about Google Cloud... it's speed now feels like Jira, which to many people's surprise has changed course and is quite fast now
I always need to remember to tell it not to touch the code, just read it or it'll take any question like "could we add library X to this" as "immediately add library X to this"...
What it excels at (because of its massive 1M token context) is code reviews. As a reference the French version of The Three Musketeers is about 700k tokens. A ~440 odd page book.
You can shove any codebase at it and ask questions about how it works and it's all in its context at the same time with no RAG magic.
I used to use Gemini occasionally with cursor 6 months ago and it wasn’t this bad. So I’m not sure what exactly caused it to be that bad.
Why would I want to do that?
I don't know if this is how the Figma integration works, but right now I'm just manually screenshotting my designs and passing them into Claude CLI as references for what I want, so this seems potentially more streamlined.
I feel no desire to switch or learn a new thing but I'm wondering if people feel like it's on par with CC or Codex or behind.
And codex seems to be catching up. But gemini-cli today was really bad on an elixir edit. I’m not sure what causes it to be that bad.
My primary tool is Gemini Code Assist. Claude is used to create the draft implementation approach and for a final sanity check of the code, as well as to propose enhancements for production readiness. This combination has worked well for me. Since Claude is expensive and Gemini is more affordable, it also makes economical sense.
I usually provide a well defined scope and detailed implementation approach, with the whole project split into submodules and the scope and implementation approach is again refined for each modules. In my experience, the programming language also matters, results are often better when using statically typed languages. We use C# and front end is always developed without AI.
I use Gemini Standard Tier and Claude Pro Tier.
When I attempted to connect to my local ollama instance (~3 months ago) the Gemini CLI config and instructions just didn't work and weren't intuitive, so I gave up.
Gemini is about 10x cheaper per token. But for some reason it's using 8 times more input tokens than CC. They also have this thing called cached tokens, which is much cheaper than not cached tokens. It's a hot cache of your context on Google side, cached automatically. So at the end of the day you don't know how much you'll pay.
Models
Google is good for very complex topics and when the conversation is short. But both models are great. I prefer Claude and Sonnet 4.5 is great all around
CLI tools
Gemini cli is at it's very early days. Doesn't support hooks or subagents. Often runs into loops it can't break out from, essentially gets stuck but you still pay for the tokens.
Claude is just great. Allows you to write complex workflows they way they are supposed to be written. Handles hooks and subagents. MD file can reference another MD file, so you can DRY your files.
Nested plan mode works weird, sometimes the agent gets stuck if it asks for plan approval and thinks it's executing it, but displays nothing... So plan mode is not fully supported in subagents.
A nice thing is that .Claude directory is automatically understood by codex or cursor, you should be able to run your Claude command using openai models via codex or maybe even other providers via Cursor.
Summary
Overall Claude is the best all around, but the tokens are crazy expensive and the subscription model is a joke. You don't know how many tokens you can use when you're subscribed, but it's 'something', and last week they changed the limits, it's suddenly half of 'something'...
But nice of them to try wrestling a file into your repo named “gemini something something”.. can’t knock them for having a go.
This one seems to showcase a bunch of the "extension" features, including a custom MCP for dealing with file line numbers.
EDIT:
I've posted about it on GitHub: https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/security/issues/81
Hopefully the relevant team will see it there.
Feedback, bug reports, and ideas are all welcome on the GitHub repo's issues tab. Happy to answer any questions here too.
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/4310
Well I guess not...
Here's a commit I found adding one of these for the Google Maps platform: https://github.com/googlemaps/platform-ai/commit/95c4efdb43c...
Extensions are always a trust challenge, but the high value of AI systems means that I expect we'll see a very high volume of attacks in the near future.