Gemini CLI harness is not good enough

I’ve long felt that while the Gemini 3 Pro model is fairly good, the Gemini CLI harness isn’t. I saw an example of this today.

Me: Tell me the GitHub IDs of all students in this directory.

Gemini CLI:

SearchText 'github' within ./
Found 100 matches (limited)
Sending this message (14606686 tokens) might exceed the remaining context window limit (1037604 tokens).

Me: Only send the (small) required snippets of data. Write code as required.

Gemini CLI:

SearchText 'github' within ./
Found 100 matches (limited)
Sending this message (14606686 tokens) might exceed the remaining context window limit (1037604 tokens).

Come ON! It’s March 2026. We can’t pretend it’s October 2025 any more.

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PS: I partly take back what I said. Codex had trouble, too. This problem may be harder than I thought. Still, Gemini CLI should not have gotten stuck where it did.