Google releases open-source Gemini API CLI built for coding agents

Google has open-sourced gemini-api, a single-binary Rust command-line tool (google-gemini/gemini-api-cli, Apache-2.0 licence) that wraps the Gemini API into seven composable shell commands for coding agents such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor and Antigravity as well as human developers.

Mechanism and agent ergonomics

Unlike Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that load every tool schema into the model’s prompt at session start, gemini-api uses progressive disclosure: an agent runs gemini-api --help to see the seven top-level verbs and inspects subcommand flags only when needed. Binary outputs such as generated images, video or audio are written to disk while only the file path is printed to stdout, keeping raw base64 payloads out of the agent’s context window. Every command supports --json, --dry-run, --output and stdin piping.

Supported capabilities

• generate: text and structured JSON via Gemini models, images via Nano Banana 2, video via Veo 3.1, speech across 30 voices and music tracks via Lyria 3.
• analyze, transcribe and embed: multimodal inspection of images, video, audio and PDFs (automatically routing files above 100MB through the Files API), timestamped speaker-diarized transcription and text or multimodal embeddings.
• agent, files and batch: autonomous multi-step web research via deep-research-pro on the Interactions API, remote file lifecycle management and asynchronous Batch API jobs at a 50% token discount.