Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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,
Chapter 4: 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.
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Chapter 5: 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. For real.
Yeah. When you started at Google, did you already know you were going to build Gemini CLI? Or was that something that kind of came together? I didn't.
After you landed.
Chapter 6: How does Gemini CLI handle user permissions and actions?
Okay. Yeah, it's a good question. One of my charters was think of what it means to build the future of developer tooling. So I started actually off at Microsoft building Geb Copilot for Visual Studio where I had built this foundation of what it meant to have more LLMs in the mix for having AI in your Code editor, AI in your chat pane, AI in your errors, and everything in between.
That was my prognosis there. But here, it was like, what's next? And so with the onset of all these CLIs, and you look at Cloud Code, they have hit it out of the park, an amazing product. Seeing some of these things just come to existence was really realizing, oh my gosh, I've done this before. Like, I did this two years ago.
It might be time to, like, take a tool, like, take a model like Gemini, which is really good at a wide variety of tasks, and bring that to developers. Because for those who don't know, like, developers are... We write a lot of code, but it doesn't take up a huge portion of our day. In a big company setting, you spend far less than half your day writing code.
A lot of it is just bottlenecked by human conversation and going back and forth.
Chapter 7: What are the benefits of using command-line interfaces for non-coders?
Actually, what is the rest of the day? Is it conversations about what the code should be? Is it getting permissions? What do you do when you're not coding?
Yeah, it's a great question. It's alignment is the biggest portion. So if you have, imagine you have a whole bunch of people who can build things at the speed of light. And that's kind of where we are today. Everything is instantaneously buildable. Well, if you have a person building a hotel and building different floors of the hotel at different times.
you go into one floor, it looks and feels one way, and you go to another floor, it looks and feels another way. It's the same thing with software. You want consistency, right? And if you go to your Google workspace, the docs and the calendar, everything that is offered has a level of consistency and the features have a level of consistency with them.
And so that also goes into the coding world, which is, well, what does it mean to build something that feels coherent?
Chapter 8: How can users effectively get started with Gemini CLI?
Because even as a user, you don't want to relearn everything every step of the way. Right. Yeah. And so it's like, so it's, it's kind of one of these double-edged swords. You can build anything almost instantaneously now, but like you really need to make sure you're building the right things in the right way. Yeah. That's kind of aligned. So that, that's a big portion of it.
And like, and that's hand-waving a lot because a lot of this goes into, well, what should we do next? And to be frank, it's also somewhat new. It, it, This ability to build things so fast is relatively new for us. We've had LM-enabled coding for a while, but it's really leveled up in the past year and a half or so.
Right. And the crazy thing about Gemini 3 Flash is that not only is it a faster model than Gemini 3, in a lot of ways it's a better coder, right? So now you have a faster, better coder that you're having to try and use whenever you come up with a new idea to build. It's like, I can build it insanely quickly.
Yeah.
It's so true.
People don't realize it, but with Gemini CLI, the entire team, most of them anyways, prefer Gemini 3 Flash. That is the thing. And we use it where we're having tens of tabs of just things just chugging, turning away in the background. And it's so efficient, and it's so fast, and it's so smart, and it's so flexible.
Even earlier this year, I installed the Google Work... We have a Google Workspace extension for Gemini CLI, and it allows you to connect your terminal to your entire workspace world. So you can get documents, calendars, chats, yeah, everything in between. It's really cool. And I was drowning in one on ones. And I love my one on ones. I love every like all like all people I talk to.
But I had too many and they were happening too frequently. Yeah. So I went to the gym and I see a lot. I'm like, yo, can you help me clear my schedule starting in the new year? But for anyone you do, please DM them and let them know that they can always reschedule something. We can do things ad hoc.
Yeah.
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