How Google's Gemini CLI Creator Ships 150 Features a Week
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
so efficient and it's so fast and it's so smart and it's so flexible and within like five minutes it had emailed messaged cleared and managed everything for me imagine having this one product that literally can take all of your information no matter where it comes from and manage it in one place right now are the default on our team everyone's 10x so we're not thinking about better anymore because it's the 10x is almost the new normal what a cool time to be alive
Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of The Neuron Podcast. I am Corey Knowles, editor of The Neuron, and we're joined, as always, by our writer and fearless friend, Grant Harvey. How are you today, my friend?
Great. Today, we are diving into AI coding tools. Specifically, what happens when you give an AI agent full access to your operating system instead of just sitting inside of a text editor?
Our guest today is Taylor Mullen, principal engineer at Google and creator of the Gemini CLI. Before Google, Taylor worked on GitHub co-pilot Visual Studio code integration at Microsoft, and his team now ships 100 to 150 features and bug fixes every week. But here's the wild part. They do it using Gemini CLI to build itself. Taylor, welcome to The Neuron.
Thank you so much for having me. I feel like when people hear that, like, oh, using it to build itself, it's very Inception-y. I'm so glad to be here, though.
How does Taylor Mullen manage multiple AI agents?
This is really exciting. What a cool time to be alive.
So we're going to just do a little quick context at the top. So we're going to dive into AI coding interfaces. And for folks who are not coders, please stick around because we're going to explain all this stuff. But then we'll also get into the weeds for those of you who are coders. Taylor, we understand that this is your first in-depth interview about Gemini CLI and the origin story behind it. Is that correct?
That's totally correct. I've had so many offline conversations and customer conversations behind closed doors. But yeah, I haven't really talked about it publicly yet. So this is kind of cool. And I'd love to be here doing this on Neuron. I'm super stoked.
Let's kind of start there.
What is the origin story of Gemini CLI?
How did this all come together?
It's kind of crazy. So roughly, I think it's almost two years ago now, I actually built an agentic terminal at a hackathon. And that's kind of the entry point. That's the starting point. People are like, wait, what? What is that? Two years ago? This is 2026. But it's funny. If we take a second and rewind ourselves... what two years ago was. This was the age of when if you're building anything with agentic AI, you were trying to use as few requests as possible, like maybe one or two in order to get a job done because it costs money every single time you spend it. You were trying to make things as fast as possible because in the age of Amazon, every like half a millisecond like resulted in a lot more of your user base just shedding and going elsewhere.
And so two and a half years or two years ago,
How does Gemini CLI improve coding efficiency?
I built it and it worked really well, but we scrapped it. And we scrapped it because things were too slow. It took like 30 seconds, 30 seconds to a minute and a half to get an answer. It took like 30 requests to actually get an answer. And it was too expensive. It took too long. And then the last key thing is people didn't believe in a CLI at the time. We're a little bit too early. And I went from hackathon to trying to bring it back into work.
Yeah.
And so it's so funny, like thinking back in that age of, oh, my gosh, now look at us where this is the age of terminals, the age of CLIs to make it so you can bring agentic AI to everything on your computer. So that was kind of like the origin origin. But like fast forward to here at Google, for those who don't know, actually, I just I think I just had my year anniversary yesterday. Oh, congrats.
That's awesome.
What techniques separate 10x engineers from 100x engineers?
Congrats.
Thank you. That is so awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I got a nice little email saying, hey, congratulations. You've been here a year. And I'm like, I've been here a year. That was the fastest year I've ever had in my entire life.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:31
2
How does Taylor Mullen manage multiple AI agents?
1:31–2:15
3
What is the origin story of Gemini CLI?
2:15–3:10
4
How does Gemini CLI improve coding efficiency?
3:10–4:04
5
What techniques separate 10x engineers from 100x engineers?
4:04–4:26
6
How does Gemini CLI handle user permissions and actions?
4:26–5:48
7
What are the benefits of using command-line interfaces for non-coders?
5:48–6:43
8
How can users effectively get started with Gemini CLI?
6:43–55:50
Speakers
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