Google AI & Gemini CLI

A quick review after two days of using them heavily

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Cover Page: Showing Gemini Inside a Network of Neurons (3iscalidraw).

Since the drop of AI tools built around LLMs, with ChatGPT leading the way, I went from being a normal developer using VS Code to using Neovim with no AI assistant.

Later on, I found myself using LLMs through chat as search assistants. Rather than wasting time going through Google search results, I just let the LLM do the task for me while I move on to the next problem.

Grok was mainly for searching since it has Deep Search, and it works great. ChatGPT for coding assistance, along with Claude if things get messy with his fellow GPT. GitHub Copilot for cases that require context from my private repositories or open source projects. Gemini wasn’t on my list at all — my early interactions with it were terrible, everything was wrong. You can check how I use these models from here.

Windsurf was good, but lately it’s been weird and keeps getting stuck in loops. I mean its coding assistant, “Cascade.”

Cursor only has an AppImage for Linux, and I hate them. Worse, it’s not free at all, and you can’t do much without paying.

VS Code is not for me anymore. I’m working on fairly big codebases, and performance-wise, it just…