Building Better Agents: Why Google’s Agents CLI and ADK 2.0 Change the Game

Building agents today is a highly fragmented process. Everyone has a framework to sell you. You have endless choices for orchestration, memory management, and deployment. The problem is that very few of these tools actually integrate smoothly into the daily workflow of a professional developer. They force you to leave your favorite coding environment to manage skills, configure state, or test logic. That context switching destroys momentum and slows down product cycles. This is exactly what Agents CLI in Agent Platform was built to solve. The Agents CLI is a set of skills designed to orchestrate, test, and deploy agents directly to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform from your favorite coding agent so you never have to break focus.

It’s a massive shift in how teams operate.

Native Integration With Coding Harnesses

The most powerful aspect of the Agents CLI is its sheer portability. Again, it runs natively inside your favorite coding agent harnesses without requiring strange workarounds. If your team lives in Claude Code, the Agents CLI operates within it seamlessly. If you prefer the Gemini CLI or Codex, it plugs in there perfectly too. This isn’t a walled garden designed to trap you.

Developers can invoke the Agents CLI to scaffold complex projects without ever leaving their terminal. When you’re writing complex agent logic, you can seamlessly pull in the CLI to manage environment variables, test complex routing, and validate large schemas. This native integration means your engineers don’t have to learn a completely separate web interface just to update a prompt. Everything lives in the console where the actual work happens every day. It makes the entire process incredibly fast and remarkably intuitive for everyone involved.

Agents CLI Enforces Standards of ADK 2.0

Writing a basic agent is easy. Writing a reliable, enterprise-grade agent is exceptionally hard. The Agent Development Kit 2.0 provides the definitive blueprint for building robust, stateful agents that don’t hallucinate when faced with complex multi-step tasks. However, reading a best practices document is very different from actually implementing those precise practices in production code. You have to translate theory into architecture.

The Agents CLI bridges that gap automatically for your team. It makes it easy to implement the very best practices of ADK 2.0 because it scaffolds your projects with those patterns by default. When you use the CLI to create a new agent, it automatically structures your routing, memory recall loops, and tool definitions according to the strict ADK 2.0 standard. You don’t have to guess how to manage complex state transitions. The CLI sets up the intricate plumbing so your engineers can focus entirely on the core business logic. It forces good architectural decisions from the very first commit, saving countless hours of refactoring later.

Supercharging AI Assistants With Native Skills

When we talk about “skills” in the context of the Agents CLI, we aren’t just talking about the tools your final agent uses. We’re talking about machine-readable capabilities designed specifically for your AI coding assistant. The Agents CLI acts as a bridge, providing Claude Code, Cursor, or the Gemini CLI with the exact context they need to interact securely with Google Cloud services on your behalf.

Instead of fighting with out-of-date training data, your coding assistant can tap directly into the Agents CLI to pull reference architectures, generate IaC templates, or scaffold complex ADK 2.0 structures automatically. These skills are bundled natively, meaning your AI partner instantly knows how to configure Cloud Run, manage AlloyDB connections, and set up proper observability. It completely removes the friction of teaching an AI assistant how to navigate enterprise infrastructure, allowing your engineers to focus entirely on writing differentiated business logic.

Deploying To Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

Local development is only half the battle for any team. The true test of any agent framework is how easily it moves from a developer’s laptop to a highly available production environment. This is where the Agents CLI shows its incredible value to ISVs building on Google Cloud. It provides a direct, totally frictionless path to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Once your agent is thoroughly tested and validated locally, deploying it’s literally a single natural language command (e.g., “Deploy the agent to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform”). The CLI packages your code, registers your unique skill dependencies, and pushes everything securely to Agent Runtime on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. You don’t have to write custom deployment scripts or manage complex container orchestration just to get your agent online. The platform handles the global scaling, the enterprise security, and the persistent monitoring automatically. It allows your engineers to stay focused on feature delivery instead of infrastructure management.

A Competitive Advantage For Software Vendors

When you look closely at the landscape of modern AI development tools, many vendors are trying to lock you into their specific IDE or proprietary web console. They want to own your entire workflow from start to finish. Google takes a fundamentally different, developer-first approach. The Agents CLI acknowledges that developers already have tools they know and love. Instead of replacing those tools, it makes them significantly more powerful.

This open philosophy gives ISVs a massive competitive advantage in a crowded market. Your teams can build sophisticated agents faster because they’re using familiar, battle-tested environments like Claude Code or Codex. They can build more reliable agents because the CLI enforces ADK 2.0 standards by default across every project. They can deploy those agents securely because it integrates flawlessly with the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. It’s a complete, end-to-end pipeline designed specifically for professional engineering teams who need to ship real products.

Check out this great demo of Agents CLI from my colleagues Ivan Cheung and Pier Paolo Ippolito:

Want to go deeper?