Expectations for Agentic Coding Tools: Testing Gemini CLI

Before I launch Gemini CLI, Google’s open source AI terminal app, let’s look at what the “quality-of-life” expectations are for agentic applications. Now that we have several of these tools — Claude Code, Warp and OpenAI Codex are other examples — we have a better sense of what a developer needs from them.

Firstly, it needs to be easy to get started on the command line in your terminal. Developers are still the primary target audience for agentic apps, so environment variables or flags for options are fine. But getting straight in…