Hi team,

Here is Gemini CLI’s April 16th weekly update for v0.38.1

The v0.38.1 release introduces public support for Subagents, alongside critical core stability and user experience refinements.

🌐 Subagents are here

Subagents allow the delegation of complex tasks to specialized, isolated expert agents. This architecture maintains primary session speed while utilizing targeted toolsets and custom instructions for intermediate objectives. [Learn More]

🔎 Subagents Feature Highlights

• Isolation & Efficiency: Each subagent operates within a unique context window, preventing context rot in the primary session.
• Parallel Execution: Support for spinning off multiple subagents simultaneously to handle research or codebase analysis in parallel.
• Built-in Experts: Access to @cli_help, @codebase_investigator, and @generalist by default.

🔩 Ways to interact with Subagents

• Explicit Delegation: Use the @agent_name syntax to route specific tasks to specialized experts.
• Custom Definitions: Create your own experts using Markdown files with YAML frontmatter in ~/.gemini/agents.
• Management: Use the /agents command to view all active and configured subagents.

🔩 CLI & Interactive Features

Enhancements to the Command Line Interface improve command discovery and session control.

• Context Management: Improved compression and overall experience for longer sessions. (feat(core): Land ContextCompressionService #24483, @joshualitt).
• New Navigation Commands: ACP now includes /about and /help commands for easier access to system information and documentation (feat(acp): add support for /about command #24649, feat(acp): add /help command #24839, @sripasg).
• Input Controls: Transitioned the primary interaction shortcut from ctrl-x to ctrl+g (feat(cli): switch to ctrl+g from ctrl-x #24861, @jacob314).
• Skill Management: Use /skills reload to immediately refresh slash commands. (fix(cli): refresh slash command list after /skills reload #24454, @NTaylorMullen).
• Role Metrics: /stats now distinguishes requests made by main agent, subagents and utility functions. (feat(cli): add role specific metrics to /stats #24659, @cynthialong0-0).

🎨 User Interface & Experience

Refinements to the UI minimize visual artifacts and improve data readability during high-volume output.

• Flicker Reduction: Improved UX mitigating display flicker during rapid tool updates (feat(ui): enable "TerminalBuffer" mode to solve flicker #24512, @jacob314).
• Prompt Ergonomics: Introduced a scrollbar for input prompts to handle multi-line queries more effectively (feat(cli) Scrollbar for input prompt #21992, @jacob314).

🎉Gemini CLI Extensions:

• Elastic:
  • Search, retrieve, and analyze Elasticsearch data in developer and agentic workflows.
    • gemini extensions install https://github.com/elastic/gemini-cli-elasticsearch
• Auth0:
  • Perform various Auth0 management operations using natural language.
    • gemini extensions install https://github.com/auth0/auth0-mcp-server

Small features, Polish, Reliability & Bug Fixes: A large amount of changes, smaller features, UI updates, reliability and bug fixes + general polish made it in this week!