Engineering on Binary Yoga

Why I Gave Up on Remote-Controlling Gemini CLI (With a Working Prototype)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was in my drafts for far too long. Things are changing rapidly, with the Claude Code codebase leak this week and these tools evolving daily holding it any longer risks making the learnings dated. I will start with a disclaimer Gemini CLI is probably last in my lineup of preferred agent harnesses — behind Claude Code, Codex, pi.dev, opencode. But that’s one of the reasons why I chose it for this exercise. I wanted to understand why some of these tools feel fast and some don’t, why Claude Code’s remote control feels native while no equivalent exists (yet) for Gemini. Building the thing myself felt like the best way to find out. So when Claude remote was first announced a few weeks ago, I started building the equivalent for Gemini CLI. This post is mainly about how I failed and what I learned along the way

Why Terminal TUI Apps Can't Have Both Scroll and Text Selection

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Background

I am currently building Cascade, AI-native terminal agent for GCP data engineering. Think Claude Code and Cortex CLI - but for GCP data engineering. However, this is still pre-alpha and I might end up scrapping the current project completely, in favour of some other stack in future, depending on what I learn while building this. However, as things stand today - Cascade is a Go terminal app, built on Bubble Tea v2, styled with Lip Gloss and I am also using the Charm ecosystem in general for components like viewports, keymaps, and terminal mouse handing. The first time I got to explore this stack was when I was building another TUI app for GCP called, well, TGCP :)

Poking around a streaming platform's unsecured API

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem

ETVWin is a Telugu streaming platform. Growing up in the 90s, ETV was the only source of entertainment for many Telugu households. It was a cultural phenomenon. So I thought, they have a huge library of nostalgia inducing content. But there is one problem - their site search sucks!

Armed with Claude Code, I decided to poke around a bit and see if there is a way to find what I was looking for. I trusted them to have designed a bad system and I was sure I could find a way around it. With a bit of poking around, I ended up downloading their entire catalog and building a local search engine for it.