Trying Out Gemini CLI (and rebooting my personal blog!)
I’ve been trying to make a more focused effort recently to dedicate at least a portion of my Fridays to getting “hands on” with new tech. This effort usually ends up taking a back-burner unfortunately because my work has been pretty busy recently. I maybe get around to trying out new tech 1 Friday a month. Today though, I was able to spend a few hours and it has been a particularly fun thread to dive into! So much so, in fact, that it has me inspired to reboot my personal blog here on Substack. :-)
Today I decided it was finally time to give the Gemini CLI a real test drive…
Sure, I’ve installed the Gemini CLI a few times and given it some basic tire-kicking in my CloudShell on the GCP console. This time though, I wanted to try out some real use cases and get to some more technical outcomes. I did some searching around and finally started out by running through this codelab which really did a nice job showing how you could take AI to the next level. There’s just something fun about running advanced AI tooling within a terminal environment. Look how cool it is. You feel like Neo hacking the Matrix just by using the tooling.
In less than 30 minutes, I had set up my environment, used AI to query and summarize news articles from the command line, and set up connections to MCP servers for Github and BigQuery natural language tooling. It was immediately useful. I was querying and summarizing news articles. I was such a fan of the output that myself instantly wanted to have this output to start my day:
✦ Here’s a summary of the latest news in the US today, November 7, 2025:
Government Shutdown and its Impact:
The US is experiencing its longest government shutdown in history, leading to significant disruptions. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has reduced flights by 4% in “high-volume markets” to maintain air traffic control safety, potentially causing thousands of flight cancellations and delays at major airports across the country, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Houston, and Chicago.[1][2] The Trump administration has also asked for an emergency pause on a judge’s order to fully fund SNAP benefits.[3][4]
Developments Related to Donald Trump:
* The Supreme Court has allowed Trump to block passport sex markers for transgender and non-binary people.[5][6][2]
* Trump pardoned Glen Casada, a Tennessee Republican convicted of federal public corruption charges.[5]
* New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist, announced her bid for New York governor.[5][7]
* The Trump administration reached a deal with Cornell University to restore research funding.[3][7]
* Trump is expected to meet with Hungarian leader Viktor Orban at the White House.[8][3]
* There are ongoing discussions and analyses regarding Trump’s popularity and the impact of the government shutdown on his administration.[5][1][2]
Other Notable News:
* The death toll from a UPS plane crash at Louisville airport has risen to 13.[5][2]
* The NCAA has banned six men’s basketball players for manipulating performances in a betting scheme.[5][1]
* Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died at the age of 24.[5][6][4]
* Seven people fell ill at Joint Base Andrews after a suspicious package was opened, leading to evacuations.[1][7][9]
* An immigrant was sentenced to time served in Wisconsin after a judge allegedly helped him dodge ICE agents.[5][1]
* A film festival in New York was canceled after China put pressure on directors.[5]
* The Senate is preparing for a key vote on a new approach to end the government shutdown.[4][7]
* Elon Musk’s new pay package was backed by Tesla voters.[9]
The most mind-blowing thing for me was the Github MCP integration. The tools published there would instantly have an efficiency impact to any development workflow. For example, I’ve been maintaining a Terraform repository of GCP infrastructure. I asked Gemini CLI to create a new branch with Cloud Functions to stop all Compute engine instances and to generate the Terraform to deploy them. Not only did it do this, but it committed the changes! (I told it to since it was a learning exercise).
Overall, today was one of those increasingly rare moments where I’m happily surprised by power of technology to the point of being inspired to keep working with it and trying to bring new ideas to fruition. I even went an extra mile today and decided to build out a container image of the Gemini CLI to try and do some more interesting things with a headless instance. Hopefully more to come on that soon - I have a few ideas I want to try developing further.
Source links and references:
Here’s the Dockerfile and a Github repo where you can download in case anyone is interested.
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