Comment by redhale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redhale | Hacker News Reader

I have used Claude Code heavily, and I've been forced to use Gemini CLI heavily (for a particular client project).

Of all my issues with Gemini CLI (and there are many), this addresses none of them. This is a fascinating product management prioritization decision. It makes me wonder if the people who build Gemini CLI actually use Gemini CLI for real work. Because I would think that if they did, they would surely have prioritized other things.

My personal biggest issue with Gemini CLI, which is a deal breaker if I have a say in the tooling I'm using, is that if you hit a per-minute rate limit (meaning it will be resolved in a few seconds) your session is forcefully and permanently switched over to using Flash and there is nothing you can do other than manually quit and restart to get back to using Pro 2.5. The status footer line will even continue to lie to you about what model you are using. I would genuinely like to understand the use cases for which this is desirable behavior. But even IF those use cases do exist, what is the harm or difficulty in giving an option to override this behavior? These models are not interchangeable. GitHub issues have been opened for months, some even with PRs attached, with no action from Google.

For comparison, Claude Code handles this situation with a simple exponential back off until the request succeeds. That's what I want, ESPECIALLY in a CLI agent that may be running headlessly in a pipeline.

This is a very valuable use case for me personally. I frequently have the problem that I change things on the filesystem in a separate tab and the agent context gets out of sync. It fails on subsequent edits, often tries to reverse the changes that I made, and many times I have to copy/paste the command I ran and it's output back into the agent window.

Your complaint is likely a product design decision rather than a engineering capacity prioritization one. As you've noted the fix is pretty trivial. I imagine that some designer or product person is intentionally holding this back for one reason or another

Claude Code has an elegant solution to the problem you mention, without trying to cram everything into a single nested pane (which feels wrong to me).

In Claude Code, when you edit a file independent from the agent, it automatically notices and says something like "I see you've made a change. Let me take a look."

I wish Gemini CLI would've taken a similar approach, since it seems to fit better with a CLI and its associated Unix philosophy.

Gemini CLI notices changes when it tries to change something and doesn't find what it expects. Then it tells you it's going to reread, and typically handles it fine.

Google is a proving ground for building "wow" factor products to line your resume with.

There isn't a drive to actually cater to users, it's a selfish endeavor which sometimes aligns with what users want. So the game is feature pack so you can leverage it for jumping ship or spring boarding internally.

It's the absolutely worst aspect of google, and I think its something worth dumping Sundar over, in order to get in a leader that will unify goals and get people who want to make great products, not great window dressings for themselves.

Worse is that when it hits a 429 and switches models, it will tell you that it switched models for the rest of the session and that you need to enter a new prompt — even if files remain in a partially-changed and non-compilable state. Telling it to “continue” got it to wrap up one sub-item but didn't finish the overall change. At this point I avoid using Gemini for any large changes because it’s likely to hit a 429 and result in such a non-compilable state.

These tools aren’t made to be used, they’re made to make the CEO look less bad by showing that “Google has these things too! We’re not falling behind! Don’t tell the board to vote to fire him!”

That’s it.

It’s not a “product”, it’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses checklist item.

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