Gemini CLI provides access to Gemini 2.5 Pro and its massive 1 million token context window through a free Gemini Code Assist license. The tool leverages the advanced capabilities of this model to understand and work with large codebases, complex queries, and multimodal inputs. Through Gemini’s multimodal capabilities, the CLI can generate new applications from diverse inputs like PDFs or sketches, demonstrating the model’s ability to process and understand different types of content beyond just text. This integration allows developers to work with visual designs, documentation, and other non-text resources as part of their development workflow.
The CLI uses Gemini’s reason and act (ReAct) loop architecture to provide intelligent, context-aware assistance that goes beyond simple question-and-answer interactions. This allows Gemini CLI to ground prompts with Google Search, fetching web pages and providing real-time, external context to the model for more accurate and current responses. The model’s large context window is particularly valuable when working with extensive codebases, as it can maintain awareness of multiple files, dependencies, and project structure simultaneously. This comprehensive understanding enables more accurate suggestions and prevents the context loss that can occur with smaller context windows.
While Gemini CLI runs as a local agent, it’s important to note that the Gemini 2.5 Pro model itself is accessed from the cloud rather than running locally. Google currently doesn’t provide support for running local models, though there might be subsets of tasks that could potentially be handled locally in the future. The model’s integration with the CLI includes sophisticated safety and privacy measures, where the tool only has access to information that users explicitly provide in prompts or reference file paths, with users deciding what context to share on a prompt-by-prompt basis. This design ensures that while the model has powerful capabilities, users maintain complete control over what information is shared and processed.