TL;DR - I like Gemini CLI. It has a very, very generous free tier and is quite intuitive. The LLM (Gemini 2.5-pro) doesn't give as "complete" an answer as Claude Sonnet 4, but in many ways that's a good thing. It's also very, very fast. Only downside is that it's Google, who have a reputation for rug-pulling.
Let's Learn Python, Again
In my last post I took Claude Code out for a spin and loved it. It was quick, slick, and had a simple workflow that I liked much more than Copilot. The only downside was the free tier was non-existent at the time of recording.
In that video, I instructed Claude Sonnet 4 that I was trying to learn Python by building something. I wanted to see what it looked like and understand the idioms seasoned Python devs use.
For context, I set up an instructions file and told Claude I was an experienced programmer most familiar with JavaScript. I told it was I was doing, what kind of code I wanted to see written, and how I like to write tests.
Overall, I think Claude did very well. Go watch the video (or read the post if you want to see details).
This time, I'm going to do the exact same thing with the exact same prompts (mostly) with Gemini CLI.
Terse, Fast, Simple
Gemini CLI together with the Pro 2.5 LLM is compelling. It's simple to set up, you don't need to give them money, and they let you know how many more free calls you can use, which are a lot.
As you'll see in the video below, the main difference is that Claude Sonnet did extra work that it assumed you might want. Gemini doesn't do that, preferring that you be specific with your prompt.
For instance: I asked Claude to build me a data access layer based on a SQL file. It did, and then proceeded to also add generic repositories for me (which I hate) with code that kind of sucked (no error checks, no transactions). It did this because I instructed it to be "pythonic" and use All The Idioms, and I guess Python people dig their repository pattern 🤮.
Gemini didn't do that when using the exact same instruction set. It focused, instead, on the SQLAlchemy models and built them out with more detail. I'm not sure I like the detail it added - but you can watch the video and tell me what you think.
30 Minutes of Gemini
So here it is. As always: would love to read your thoughts. You can leave a comment here if you're a member, or reply to this email if you're on my list!
Thanks for watching...