Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is what anyone serious is using and we get all the dev and inspection tools already. And it works perfectly. This only has appeal to those starting out and confused into thinking this is the way. The answer is almost never MCP.

> Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know.

As someone that does heavy agentic coding (using basically all the tools), this is so far from the truth. People claiming this have probably never worked in large enterprise environments where things like authentication, RBAC, rate limiting, abuse detection, centralized management/updates/ops, etc. are a huge part of the development and deployment workflow.

In these situations you can't just use skills and cli tools without a gigantic amount of retooling and increased operational and security complexity. MCP is really useful here, and allows centralized eng and ops teams to manage their services in a way that aligns with the organizations overall posture, policies, and infrastructure.

> Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful.

This part I totally agree. It's really hard to express how bad it is (and it's really disappointing.)

FYI: Gemini Cli is used internally at Google. It's actually more popular than Antigravity. Google uses MCP services internally for code search (since everything is in a mono-repo you don't want to waste time grepping billions of files), accessing docs and bugs, and also accessing project specific RAG databases for expertise grounding.

Source - I know people at Google.

> Also MCP is very obviously dead

Some people will push back on this. They are holding out hope that the recent improvements Anthropic has made in this regard have improved the context rot problem with MCP. Anthropic's changes improve things a little. But it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.

The reason MCP is dying/dead is because MCP servers, once configured, bloat up context even when they are not being used. Why would anybody want that?

Use agent skills. And say goodbye to MCP. We need to move on from MCP.

MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency is still an issue regardless.

I don't know if this just anecdotal random impression, but in a last week or two I had mostly good experience with Google cli. While previously I constantly complained about it. I have been using it together with codex, and I would not say that one is much better than another.

It is hard to say nowadays, when things change so quickly

MCP is dead? Which cli tool should we use to instruct Chrome to open a page and click the Open button? And to read what appears in the console after clicking?

MCP permanently sacrifice a chunk of the context window? And a skill for you cli is free?

Antigravity's coding agent is worlds apart from Gemini CLI, though.

I know it’s a bit of a tangent but man you’re right re. Gemini CLI. It’s woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a “free” user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their coding plan is called today.

> Also MCP is very obviously dead...

Couldn't have been more wrong. MCP despite its manageable downsides is leagues ahead of anything else in many ways.

The fact that SoTA models are trained to handle MCP should be hint enough to the observant.

I probably build one MCP tool per week at work.

And every project I work on gets its own MCP tool too. It's invaluable to have specialized per-project tooling instead of a bunch of heterogeneous scripts+glue+prayer.

Anything specialized goes into an MCP.

some serious people use vibium instead. (full-disclosure: "some serious people" is me.)

> So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it.

I use it extensively, many of my colleagues do. I get a ton of value out of it. Some prefer Antigravity, but I prefer Gemini CLI. I get fairly long trajectories out of it, and some of my colleagues are getting day-long trajectories out of it. It has improved massively since I started using it when it first came out.

MCP is not just used for coding.

> Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in

What about all the CLI tools not baked into the model's priors?

Every time someone says "extensibility mechanism X is dead!", I think "Well, I guess that guy isn't doing anything that needs to extend the statistical average of 2010s-era Reddit"