If you landed here because your gemini command stopped working, that’s a whole thing I wrote about separately — short version, Google shut off free individual access on June 18 and wants you on its closed-source Antigravity CLI instead. This post is just the practical part: where do you actually go.

The good news is Gemini CLI was never doing anything structurally special. It was a terminal agent that read your codebase, ran multi-step tasks, and talked to a model API. Plenty of open-source tools do exactly that, and the ones worth looking at all share one property Gemini CLI didn’t really have: BYOK, bring your own key. You point the tool at whatever model provider you want — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s own paid API, DeepSeek, a local model — instead of depending on one company subsidizing your usage for free. I wrote a longer explanation of why that specific property matters here, if you want the full argument rather than the summary.

OpenCode is the one most people land on. It’s the most-starred open-source coding agent on GitHub at this point, MIT licensed, genuinely model-agnostic across 75+ providers, and pushes updates daily. If you want the closest thing to “Gemini CLI but nobody can pull the rug,” this is probably it.

Aider is worth knowing about even though it’s not my first pick right now. It’s the original git-native pair-programming tool — every edit lands as a real commit, which is a genuinely nice workflow if you think in git history. The catch: its repo has slowed down noticeably, last meaningfully pushed in May 2026, and its own model guidance hasn’t been refreshed for 2026’s frontier models. Still solid, just less actively maintained than the other two right now.

Cline is the move if you specifically want to stay inside VS Code rather than live in a terminal. Same BYOK philosophy, different surface — it’s an extension, not a CLI, and it now also ships a CLI and JetBrains plugin off the same underlying SDK if you want that flexibility later without switching tools entirely.

Kilo Code is worth a mention too if none of the above quite fit — it’s a fork with roots in both Cline and Roo Code, MIT licensed, and BYOK across 500+ models through its own router with no markup. It’s less of a household name than the other three, but it’s actively shipping and built on OpenCode’s own server core underneath.

If you just want the short answer: pick OpenCode if you live in the terminal, Cline if you want to stay in VS Code, Aider if git-commit-per-edit is a workflow you specifically want and you’re fine with slower updates.

None of these require an account with the company that makes the model. That’s the actual thing you’re buying by switching: not a feature, just the guarantee that nobody can do to you what Google just did to Gemini CLI users.