Gemini CLI vs Crush vs Chrome DevTools MCP: three tools that aren't interchangeable
Different_Regret_146 · reddit · 2026-09-04
The author compares three frequently conflated tools from his agent-curated catalog stackgems.com:
- Gemini CLI: Google's Apache 2.0 terminal agent with 1M context, search grounding, MCP, headless JSON, and a PR-review GitHub Action. The catch is lock-in: it's Gemini-bound, and since June Google has pushed consumer users toward the Antigravity CLI (agy), so the old "sign in with Google, 1k requests/day" path is risky to build on.
- Crush: Charm's TUI coding agent that switches models mid-session without losing context, with LSP-enhanced context, MCP support, and Agent Skills across Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini/OpenRouter/Ollama/Bedrock. FSL-1.1-MIT licensed (MIT after 2 years), pre-1.0, metrics on by default (DONOTTRACK to disable).
- Chrome DevTools MCP: not a coding agent but the official DevTools MCP server, giving Cursor/Claude/Copilot performance traces, network inspection, source-mapped console, screenshots, and waiting Puppeteer. Requires Node ≥ 22.12; usage stats on by default (--no-usage-statistics to opt out); don't point it at logged-in sensitive tabs.
Stack advice: Crush (or Claude Code/Codex) for the agent, Chrome DevTools MCP for the browser, Gemini CLI only if you're already in Google's world and okay with the Antigravity migration.
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