Yeah, you may have nailed it. Gemini is a good model, but in the Gemini CLI with a prompt like, "I'd like to add <feature x> support. What are my options? Don't write any code yet" it will proceed to skip right past telling me my options and will go ahead an implement whatever it feels like. Afterward it will print out a list of possible approaches and then tell you why it did the one it did.

Codex is the best at following instructions IME. Claude is pretty good too but is a little more "creative" than codex at trying to re-interpret my prompt to get at what I "probably" meant rather than what I actually said.

Try the conductor extension for gemini-cli: https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/conductor

It won't make any changes until a detailed plan is generated and approved.

Can you (or anyone) explain how this might be? The "agent" is just a passthrough for the model, no? How is one CLI/TUI tool better than any other, given the same model that it's passing your user input to?

I am familiar with copilot cli (using models from different providers), OpenCode doing the same, and Claude with just the \A models, but if I ask all 3 the same thing using the same \A model, I SHOULD be getting roughly the same output, modulo LLM nondeterminism, right?

I've had the exact opposite experience. After including in my prompt "don't write any code yet" (or similar brief phrase), Gemini responds without writing code.

Using Gemini 2.5 or 3, flash.