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tomo-labs

gemini-cli

A review of the system prompt gemini-cli sent to the model, recovered from the trace proxy after its Gemini-wire traffic was normalized to chat-completions, stored raw and linked.

Recovered with lab prompts gemini-cli from the trace proxy (newest capture 20260711T110355Z). gemini-cli speaks Google's Gemini wire, which the proxy translates to a single chat-completions call, so the prompt below is what reached the model after normalization, not a copy from the tool's source. The prompt is stored raw under prompts/gemini-cli/; this page reviews it and links to the file. Sizes are in tokens, counted with the o200k_base encoding.

Agent prompt

  • 5,872 tokens
  • tools (15): read_file, write_file, replace, glob, grep_search, run_shell_command, google_web_search, web_fetch, invoke_agent, activate_skill, enter_plan_mode, and more
  • raw: prompts/gemini-cli/1-agent.md

gemini-cli writes a long, prescriptive prompt built around explicit workflows. It walks the model through mandated sequences, understand then plan then implement then verify, and pins down a strict tone for a command-line setting, so much of the weight is procedure rather than tool description. That it lands as the second-largest prompt in the field is a deliberate style choice: heavy up-front scaffolding in exchange for predictable, step-by-step behaviour. Because the tool normalizes from the Gemini wire, this capture is also a useful check that the translation preserves the whole prompt intact.