Now Open for Building: Introducing Gemini CLI Extensions

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.

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.

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'...

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.