Gemini CLI Framework

Instar’s agent layer is framework-agnostic: the same persistent-autonomy “mind” (jobs, messaging, monitoring, the whole capability surface) runs on top of different coding-agent CLIs — Claude Code, Codex CLI, and now Gemini CLI. Each framework needs a runtime adapter — the plumbing that spawns the CLI, parses its output, resumes its sessions, and maps its hooks — and building that adapter is the real work of onboarding a framework. Gemini support was added as the keystone of the apprenticeship program (Step 2).

Selecting Gemini

Choose gemini-cli as the framework when you set up an agent, or bind a single topic to it. The Gemini CLI must be installed and signed in first. Gemini is then a first-class framework everywhere the others are — session launch, resume, monitoring, and the framework-blind safety surfaces all understand it.

The production path — GeminiCliIntelligenceProvider

When Instar needs Gemini to make a one-shot judgment (a cross-model review, a gate decision), it builds a GeminiCliIntelligenceProvider. This provider spawns a single, pinned, canonical command — gemini -m <model> --approval-mode default with the prompt as exactly one argument — closes stdin, caps the captured output, and runs under the same circuit-breaker the other providers use.

The provider is a deliberately locked-down evaluation path: it pins the safe approval mode and is never reachable from a tool-taking mode. That is distinct from the agentic session path, where a Gemini agent doing real autonomous work launches with auto-approve (Gemini’s --yolo) exactly like a Claude agent uses skip-permissions or a codex agent uses bypass — so the agent can actually act, while one-shot evaluations stay safe.

Credential safety

GeminiCliIntelligenceProvider builds the child environment from an explicit allowlist and unconditionally removes the known Google/Gemini billing environment variables, so Gemini stays on its cached-OAuth credentials and can never be silently billed through an injected API key — the same Rule-1 posture the codex adapter enforces.

Framework-blind safety

Adding a framework can silently break monitoring that was written for the existing ones. Gemini’s session/transcript layout is now understood by the resume map, the rate-limit and compaction recovery checks, and the process/activity detectors — and a drift canary fails the build if any future framework is added without a correct resolver, so this class of silent fleet-wide breakage is caught in CI rather than in production.