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Buddy Agent Harness

Gemini CLI

Gemini CLI reads .agents/skills at both scopes — ~/.agents/skills for the user, and .agents/skills/ inside a repository, where that alias takes precedence over .gemini/skills/. It does not read AGENTS.md. So it needs the instruction bridge and no skills projection.

Skills: nothing to write

Section titled “Skills: nothing to write”

init writes no skills bridge for Gemini CLI. Enabling it is free — nothing is created in the repository.

A .gemini/skills symlink written before this was established still resolves, because that path is still scanned. It is redundant, not broken; nothing has to be torn out.

Until 2026-08-18 this page said Gemini CLI read only .gemini/skills/ in a repository. That was wrong: the vendor’s discovery code reads the .agents/skills alias at workspace scope as well, and has since at least 2026-04-30.

Instructions: required

Section titled “Instructions: required”

The CLI does not write this one, and it cannot be a link. Add AGENTS.md to context.fileName in .gemini/settings.json:

{
  "context": {
    "fileName": ["AGENTS.md", "GEMINI.md"]
  }
}

AGENTS.md is not in the default list. Without this edit, Gemini CLI gets no instructions at all from a repository that consolidated into AGENTS.md.

When the settings file already exists:

  • It is user-authored, so approval comes first.
  • Add to the array; do not replace it. Preserve every surrounding setting.
  • Comments are legal in this file, and a parse-and-rewrite deletes them. Edit the array in place, keeping key order and indentation. See JSON configuration disagrees about comments.
  • Keep GEMINI.md in the list if the repository still has one.

Not the same as Antigravity

Section titled “Not the same as Antigravity”

Both are Google’s, and both read the canonical directory in a repository, but they are still separate targets. Antigravity’s user-scope skills live under ~/.gemini/config/skills/, not ~/.agents/skills/, and it is not selectable via --harness because it documents no project-scope directory to detect on. Enabling one says nothing about the other.

Reference

Section titled “Reference”