Hacker News Reader

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.

Completely agree - the research output should be integrated into a customer facing product, instead they are trying to integrate customers into into research output.

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.

That is so, but the problem this causes is more than just customer confusion - it is a lack of integration and responsibility. There is no "let's polish this and see if it works based on real user feedback", but it's "let's throw this out and shut it down if it doesn't work".

And if it isn't shut down, it is left in that terrible half-documented state, with confusing integrations and terribly integrated into the rest of the product.

Considering I'm confused both as a customer, user and a shareholder, I'd say the tactic isn't working.

If they throw it out and it's great then they get accolades; if they throw it out and it's bad, they don't. If they polish it and see if it works based on real user feedback then they also don't but it took longer. Better to just throw everything at the wall the instant it has the potential to go viral and then move on if it doesn't.

Remember that Google operates at huge scale, so even something any other company would consider wildly successful (e.g. Reader) is a waste of resources for them. That means that if you're ramping up your product over the course of a year you're wasting time and money. Go big or go home.

I've come to realize that life is all about having different eggs in different baskets . Some will go bad and some will hatch into beautiful chicks .

Yeah and they have like 50 coding agents, because everyone in the entire company turned to doing the same thing. There's not that much you can invent in this space.

The teams of people want to get their work out into the public to make a big splash so they can get a sweet bonus before anyone realizes that it's not actually useful or effective. See also: Google Wave, and 80% of their other products.

They don't get a sweet bonus and promotion for helping another team improve a product, so why collaborate? Just create your own chat app according to your own team's vision/goals/available technology and release it and hope it gains more traction than the other teams' existing options.

This will explain everything you need to know about Google Wave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

> 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.

If I didn't know better, I'd think you were joking.

To be fair, the "Hello Vasco" is a generated background image and not part of the chat context. But still, you would think they would put your name in the system prompt.

> you would think they would put your name in the system prompt

They probably do, along with "pretend to not have any personal information about the user".

That's what they tried with HAL-9000, and remember what happened!

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.

And Gemini CLI github action (this project) runs again in a VM (github action runner) on a separate checkout of the code. This is what OP meant with multiple coding agents.

> This is what OP meant with multiple coding agents.

It may be the same coding agent behind the GHA. I question the implicit declaration behind OPs critique: that all 160,000+ Google folk should offer a single coding agent to their billions of users (or whatever the TAM is for coding agents). This is akin to criticizing Google Cloud for having VM, Kubernetes clusters and AppEngine; superficially, these products solve the same problem.

FWIW - this Github Actions integration is close to my ideal AI agents workflow[0]. I don't want to metaphorically look over my agents shoulder as it works in a specialized, vendor-locked IDE. I want agents to work asynchronously, taking however long they need, and tackling multiple tasks, with PRs/CLs as the unit of work. Current models may not be up to the task of single-shotting this, but the task is parallelizable across multiple agent-instances & the best solution selected (climate change be damned). I suspect Github alone may not provide adequate context as it may be missing previous tickets and design documents & the back-and-forth on requirements, but it's a start, and I'm glad Google is exploring this path for agents.

0. I believe in this workflow so much I created a proof-of-concept project that reads tickets from Vikunja and creates PRs using Aider some weeks back.

Jules can't even get past a basic-ass "npm build" script that works both on my mac and in a docker container". Are they running a Windows NT VM or something?

Also, if you are on Google Workspace, then everything changes there too. Activating the Gemini CLI is a smile while crying emoji kind of activity if you are trying to provide this to an entire organization [1]

[1]: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...

Face it, they have hit the "Yahoo phase" of their company life. It was a good, long run. All that remains is buying larger and larger successful startups and grinding them in to dust.

But the the "sunsetting" of projects good or bad, random shotgun approaches to everything, super awesome islands of product that slowly get bled dry... it is a failure of management structure, not just management.

I don't know the guts of Google, but I imagine there are 500 VPs (or equivalent) each with their pet project, each trying to curry favor with the boss who sent an email blast to "go big on Gemini". It feels like many teams just dropped their old busted projects and moved on to the new hotness, to hell with the customers, consistency or revenue. The only metric now is "Gemini engagement".

People have been saying this for the last 10 years.

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.

100. That's essentially the function of a GH Action, which is why I'm also confused by the pomp and circumstance of the announcement.

Now if they could get Gemini (the LLM) to run on a GH Actions runner I'd be more excited.

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.

> 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.

They do, but at this point it's becoming comical, especially if they are trying to move away from search as a profit center. You need equity in people's heads if you want to conquer the market.

If instead of Google search they made 3 products each called "Google Search", "Super Search" and "YaGoo!", they wouldn't be where they're at today.

> 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.

Jules is for hobbyists / vibe coding, Gemini CLI is for developers in a team.

AI studio has humans reading all your work tho, that’s not acceptable for many use cases

I believe in silicon valley terms, this is called "moving fast and breaking things"