Okay, so not “Gemini Code Assist” but sufficiently similar that I think it warrants the “3/3” appellation.

I’m not a huge fan of all the se Node.JS-based CLI tools but, Google has released Gemini CLI. It’s good to have a CLI-based tool and it feels otherwise similar to the “Gemini Code Assist” chat.

I don’t (want to) run Node.JS on my Linux host and so am using the containerized version of the CLI here. It’s all documented on the gemini-cli repo but the auth functionality is sub-optimal (see [#1437] ) and you’ll want to use an API key if you can (see below):

Solved!

Ugh.

Before I continue, one important detail from yesterday’s experience which I think I didn’t clarify is that, unlike the Copilot agent, it appears (!?) that Gemini agent only supports integration with MCP servers via stdio. As a result, the only way to integrate with HTTP-based MCP servers (local or remote) is to proxy traffic through stdio as mcp-remote and the Rust example herein.

The most helpful change was to take a hint from the NPM mcp-remote and create a log file. This helps because, otherwise the mcp-remote process, because it’s launched by Visual Studio Code, well Gemini Code Assist agent, isn’t trivial to debug.

Former Microsoftie and Googler:

Good documentation Extend your agent with Model Context Protocol

Not such good documentation: Using agentic chat as a pair programmer

Definition of “good” being, I was able to follow the clear instructions and it worked first time. Well done, Microsoft!

This space is moving so quickly and I’m happy to alpha test these companies’ solutions but (a) Google’s portfolio is a mess. This week I’ve tried (and failed) to use Gemini CLI (because I don’t want to run Node.JS on my host machine and it doesn’t work in a container: issue #1437) and now this.