4 weeks ago
Fri Jul 4, 2025 1:45pm PST
Tell HN: My Experience with Gemini CLI (Vs Claude Code)
To make a comparison here with Claude Code, I was initially impressed with Geminis ability to keep a long conversation on track, but now routinely encounter pretty dumb and infuriating behavior from it:

- Gemini rarely gets the hint when I express annoyance with its output. Claude has an uncanny ability to guess what I find wrong with its output (even when I just respond with WTF!) and will try to fix it, often in actually useful ways; Gemini just keeps repeating its last output after acknowledging my annoyance.

- Gemini CLI once kept using an old version of a file I had updated by hand, despite me asking it several times to re-read the file. It also sometimes proposes empty changes.

- Gemini CLI's format for proposing changes in the terminal is such that you often can't make out what's actually changing. I have to keep choosing the option to view the changes in VSCode, and yet you cannot even accept the changes in VSCode, you have to close the VSCode window and then go back to the terminal to accept. Claude on the other shows changes clearly even right in the terminal, and if you prefer always viewing changes in VSCode, you can configure that once.

- Gemini CLI's permission systems is not as usable as Claude Code's. When Claude Code offers to permit it to do some actions without asking for further permission, it is always clear what class of action is being allowed. With Gemini this is sometimes very vague, making me hesitant to grant it that permission.

- Claude can be started with an initial prompt and still retain interactive mode. This option is useful for priming the session with instructions in a more direct way that CLAUDE.md. For example:

    claude "Please carefully read the CLAUDE.md and README.md files"
As far I can tell, Gemini CLI does not offer anything similar.

I guess the thing going for it is that it has a free tier of use, and the core intelligence is probably about on par with Claude. But it's slow too.

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