It looks like the key idea here is that a GitHub repo can have a gemini-extension.json file which specifies some MCP servers and a GEMINI.md file, then you can tell Gemini CLI to add that repo and it will fetch and configure those details.
"The extensions listed here are sourced from public repositories and created by third-party developers. Google does not vet, endorse, or guarantee the functionality or security of these extensions. Please carefully inspect any extension and its source code before installing to understand the permissions it requires and the actions it may perform. "
Extensions are always a trust challenge, but the high value of AI systems means that I expect we'll see a very high volume of attacks in the near future.
My recent experience of Gemini CLI in comparison to Claude code is very negative. For a complex task of trying to migrate some code base from CPU-only to GPU computations Claude was really helpful, and allowed me to conduct a range of experiments and converge towards sensible architecture. In the same time I simply was not able to get anything useful out of Gemini. Some code was written, but it was not tested, was failing or timing out and after repeated prodding Gemini got into loops or internal errors.
Watching Gemini CLI repo daily is great insight into how Google works. Tons of commits, three release channels, great ambitions and very little to show. These guys are running in all directions and getting nowhere.
I once spent an hour trying to get an API key for Gemini from AIStudio and Vertex, with assistance from LLMs, and finally gave up and used OpenRouter. It's that great an experience.
Gemini is really bad with tool calling, doesn't matter if you use it with Gemini CLI or with OpenCode, its just that the model itself is not a agentic model. It can be okay if only use it for asking stuff about the codebase, but not for doing agentic stuff. It'll waste large parts of its context window just failing to do tool calling properly.
The last time I was locked out of Claude Code I gave gemini cli a try. 10 minutes and lots of weird scrolling and screen flashing later, and it kept trying to add and remove the same function from the same file over and over, in a loop, until it exhausted its credits and demanded I upgrade.
What it excels at (because of its massive 1M token context) is code reviews. As a reference the French version of The Three Musketeers is about 700k tokens. A ~440 odd page book.
You can shove any codebase at it and ask questions about how it works and it's all in its context at the same time with no RAG magic.
If there's value in a human using Figma, there's value in being able to give a "bot" instructions to do whatever a person might. e.g. "Gemini, update all the Figma layouts with this new text."
Presumably the reverse would be more valuable: design something in Figma, then have Gemini CLI read from Figma and use that as a reference while writing the code.
I don't know if this is how the Figma integration works, but right now I'm just manually screenshotting my designs and passing them into Claude CLI as references for what I want, so this seems potentially more streamlined.
I’ve regularly used prompts along the lines ‘please modify the UI tor x feature to look like the selected Figma frame’. It’s ideal for a designing developer who wants to be much more specific about the user experience.
Cool, but at the same time, it feels overwhelming: so many different CLI or IDE tools, so many extension points. It will be fascinating to see how this all shakes out.
Readit News
Here's a commit I found adding one of these for the Google Maps platform: https://github.com/googlemaps/platform-ai/commit/95c4efdb43c...
Extensions are always a trust challenge, but the high value of AI systems means that I expect we'll see a very high volume of attacks in the near future.
I used to use Gemini occasionally with cursor 6 months ago and it wasn’t this bad. So I’m not sure what exactly caused it to be that bad.
What it excels at (because of its massive 1M token context) is code reviews. As a reference the French version of The Three Musketeers is about 700k tokens. A ~440 odd page book.
You can shove any codebase at it and ask questions about how it works and it's all in its context at the same time with no RAG magic.
Why would I want to do that?
I don't know if this is how the Figma integration works, but right now I'm just manually screenshotting my designs and passing them into Claude CLI as references for what I want, so this seems potentially more streamlined.
This one seems to showcase a bunch of the "extension" features, including a custom MCP for dealing with file line numbers.
EDIT:
I've posted about it on GitHub: https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/security/issues/81
Hopefully the relevant team will see it there.
Feedback, bug reports, and ideas are all welcome on the GitHub repo's issues tab. Happy to answer any questions here too.