Gemini CLI

I love how fragmented Google's Gemini offerings are. I'm a Pro subscriber, but I now learn I should be a "Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise" user to get additional usage. I didn't even know that existed! As a run of the mill Google user I get a generous usage tier but paying them specifically for "Gemini" doesn't get me anything when it comes to "Gemini CLI". Delightful!

Actually, that's the reason a lot of startups and solo developers prefer non-Google solutions, even though the quality of Gemini 2.5 Pro is insanely high. The Google Cloud Dashboard is a mess, and they haven't fixed it in years. They have Vertex that is supposed to host some of their models, but I don't understand what's the difference between that and their own cloud. And then you have two different APIs depending on the level of your project: This is literally the opposite of what we would expect from an AI provider where you start small and regardless of the scale of your project, you do not face obstacles. So essentially, Google has built an API solution that does not scale because as soon as your project gets bigger, you have to switch from the Google AI Studio API to the Vertex API. And I find it ridiculous because their OpenAI compatible API does not work all the time. And a lot of tools that rely on that actually don't work.

Google's AI offerings that should be simplified/consolidated:

- Jules vs Gemini CLI?

- Vertex API (requires a Google Cloud Account) vs Google AI Studio API

Also, since Vertex depends on Google Cloud, projects get more complicated because you have to modify these in your app [1]:

``` # Replace the `GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT` and `GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION` values # with appropriate values for your project. export GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT=GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT export GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION=global export GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=True ```

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/start/...

@sachinag is afk but wanted me to flag that he's on point for fixing the Cloud Dashboard - it's WIP!

Thanks Chris!

"The Google Cloud Dashboard is a mess, and they haven't fixed it in years." Tell me what you want, and I'll do my best to make it happen.

In the interim, I would also suggest checking out Cloud Hub - https://console.cloud.google.com/cloud-hub/ - this is us really rethinking the level of abstraction to be higher than the base infrastructure. You can read more about the philosophy and approach here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-developme...

Ninjaing in here: Thanks for reading this!

I’m a small time GCP customer for five or six years, and relatively tech competent, and I had a very difficult time getting Gemini code set up yesterday with Vertex API keys; finally I had to use gcloud to login from the CLI in combination with clicking a link and doing web sign on from Gemini. This frustrated me, not least because I have API direct calls to Vertex Gemini working from Aider, although I could not tell you exactly what incantation I finally used to make it work. In particular it didn’t look to me like the Gemini code app uses something like dotenv? I don’t recall now; upshot - could get it to tell me I was logged in wrong / had an oauth2 error / needed a project id at various times, but no inference.

What I wanted: to be able to go to a simple page tied to a google login and generate named API keys that can be used from anywhere to query Gemini models with a SINGLE key and environment variable kept in a .env file. I would prefer to pre-fill the account that debits by API usage. For an example, you could sign up for Anthropic API, OpenAI API, OpenRouter to see their customer flows. They are extremely simple in comparison to getting a new account (or even an old one) in shape to do metered billing for Gemini inference.

I then want this API key to work, regardless of what gcloud “knows” about me — am I logged in to a GCP account? Don’t care. What’s my current “Project?” Don’t care. What’s the difference between Vertex and Gemini? Don’t care.

As I write this, I bet a startup could be launched just offering this as a wrapper. This is surprisingly painful!

Thanks again for all the work; looking forward to seeing more out of Gemini.