Been trying Gemini for the last 2 hours or so, and I specifically wanted to test their agentic capabilities with a new prompt I've been using on Claude Code recently which really seems to stretch it's agentic "legs".

A few things:

1. For Claude: I used Opus.

2. For Gemini: I used gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05 via their .env method they mentioned in their config guide.

I used the EXACT same prompt on both, and I didn't use Ultrathink to make it more fair since Gemini doesn't have this reasoning hook.

I want you to think long and hard, and I want you to do the following in the exact order specified:

1. Spawn 5 sub agents and have them review all of the code in parallel and provide a review. Read all source files in their entirety.

1a. Divide up the workload evenly per sub agent.

2. Have each sub agent write their final analysis to their individual and dedicated files in the SubAgent_Findings folder. Sub agent 1 will write to SubAgent_1.md, sub agent 2 will write to SubAgent_2.md, etc.

3. Run two bash commands in sequence:

3a. for file in SubAgent_{1..5}.md; do (echo -e "\n\n" && cat "$file") >> Master_Analysis.md; done

3b. for file in SubAgent_*.md; do > "$file"; done

I chose this prompt for 3 reasons:

1. I wanted to see if Gemini had any separate "task"-like tools (sub agents).

2. If it DIDN'T have sub agents. How would it attempt to split this request up?

3. This is a prompt where it's important to do the initial fact-finding task in parallel, but then do the final analysis and subsequent bash commands in sequence.

4. It's purposefully a bit ambiguous (the code) to see how the model/agent would actually read through the codebase and/or which files it dictated were important.

I feel like the Claude results are decently self explanatory just from the images. It is essentially what I have seen previously. It essentially does everything exactly as requested/expected. You can see the broken up agentic tasks being performed in parallel, and you can see how many tokens were used per sub agent.

The results were interesting on the Gemini side:

On the Gemini side I *THINK* it read all the files....? Or most of the files? Or big sections of the files? I'm not actually sure.

After the prompt you can see in the picture it seems to use the "ReadManyFiles" tool, and then it started to proceed to print out large sections of the source files, but maybe only the contents of like 3-4 of them, and then it just stopped....and then it proceeded with the final analysis + bash commands.

It followed the instructions overall, but the actual quality of the output is.......concise? Is maybe the best way to put it. Or potentially it just straight up hallucinated a lot of it? I'm not entirely sure, and I'll have to read through specific functions on a per file basis to verify.

It's strange, because the general explanation of the project seems relatively accurate, but there seems to be huge gaps and/or a lot of glossing over of details. It ignored my config file, .env file, and/or any other supporting scripts.

As you can see the final analysis file that Gemini created was 11KB and is about 200 LOC.

The final analysis file that Claude created was 68KB and is over 2000 LOC.

Quickly skimming that file I noticed it referenced all of the above mentioned files that Gemini missed, and it also had significantly more detail for every file and all major functions, and it even made a simplified execution pipeline chart in ASCII, lol.

Google’s Gemini CLI finally feels like an AI that belongs in the terminal, but the real twist? Devs testing it side-by-side with Claude Code are noticing Claude quietly outperforms it in reasoning-heavy tasks; cleaner refactors, sharper edge-case spotting, and better repo-level understanding. Gemini CLI is fast and environment-aware, but Claude Code is acting like the senior engineer who already read your whole codebase twice.

Still, if you want a quick look at how Gemini CLI is evolving in real workflows, this breakdown helps: Gemini CLI