Google Entered the Chat

Google shipped Gemini CLI today and the headline feature, the one they led with, is that you sign in with your personal Google account and get 60 model requests per minute and 1,000 per day, for free, using Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Not a trial. Not a credit that expires. You sign in, you get the thing.

I spent the afternoon throwing work at it. Softball fixes — the kind where you already know the answer and you're just testing whether the model can read — and it knocked them out clean, under a minute each, no ceremony. Concise. Smart. Didn't ask me three clarifying questions before touching a single file.

Then I gave it harder things.

It dropped the ball. Not catastrophically — more like the confident intern who handles the first four tasks so well you give them something real, and then you're explaining why the approach was wrong while they look at you like you've changed the rules mid-game. I gave up and went back to Claude.

But here's the thing: free is a very compelling price point for the things it's actually good at. I'm going to keep routing certain classes of work at it — the obvious bugs, the boilerplate, the stuff where being 90% right is fine because I'm reviewing it anyway. That's real value. That's compute I'm not paying for.

And if Google can crank the quality a bit — close the gap on the harder stuff — this stops being a curiosity and starts being leverage. The kind that makes pricing conversations at Anthropic very interesting very fast.

Competition is good. I keep saying this and I keep meaning it.