Gemini CLI launched in June 2025 and grew fast — 107k+ stars, Apache 2.0, and for a while the only agentic terminal tool running Gemini models at zero cost with the largest context window in its category. It had the usual open-source terminal-agent feature set: Google Search grounding, MCP support, a GEMINI.md file for project context, the works. For a stretch, it was the obvious first recommendation for anyone who wanted a genuinely free, genuinely open terminal agent without needing their own API key.
On June 18, 2026, that stopped working for most people. Google shut off Gemini CLI and the Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions for anyone on Google AI Pro, Ultra, or the free individual tier. Any script, CI pipeline, or shell alias still calling gemini just started failing, with no grace period built in for people to migrate first. The stated reason is a strategic consolidation: Google wants one CLI effort instead of several competing internally, and that effort is Antigravity CLI — a closed-source rewrite in Go that reportedly didn’t have full feature parity with Gemini CLI at launch, meaning some people switching over lost functionality on top of losing the source access.
Here’s the part that actually stuck with me: the Gemini CLI repository is still sitting there, still Apache 2.0, technically unchanged. Google’s own team said as much — the code remains open, and they’ll keep pushing model updates, bug fixes, and security patches “for our enterprise customers.” Everyone else just lost the backend that made the open code do anything useful day to day. You can still read it, fork it, self-host parts of it, point it at your own Gemini API key if you have one and are willing to pay per-call. You can’t easily use it the free, batteries-included way it was designed to be used, because the thing that made it free was Google’s infrastructure sitting behind it, and that’s the part that got walled off. The code being open and the tool being usable turned out to be two separable promises, and only one of them survived.
If you’re one of the people this hit, I put together a longer rundown of what actually replaces it, here — short version: OpenCode, Aider, or Cline, all BYOK so nobody can pull this exact move on you a second time.
