fix(gemini): read Gemini CLI's composer bar and spinner line so a turn can end

A gemini session stayed "working" for good after its first turn. Its braille
spinner trips the generic SPINNER_PATTERN and marks the pane working, but only
a composer glyph arms the idle confirmation and gemini declared none, so it
fell back to Claude's `❯`, which gemini never draws.

Measured on live Gemini CLI 0.63.0 panes (capture-pane every 300 ms through
real turns with a shell call at 40, 120 and 200 columns, YOLO and default
approval mode, plus the raw PTY stream). The turns ran against a local
stand-in for the Gemini API (GOOGLE_GEMINI_BASE_URL, which Codeman's custom
endpoint support already sets), since the CLI's TUI does not depend on the
backend and no account is needed for it:

- The TUI repaints its whole bottom region every frame, composer included,
  and the composer sits between a `▄` bar and a `▀` bar; the submitted prompt
  is echoed between the same bars. The `▀` bar arms the idle check: every
  repaint carries it, tmux's reattach repaint too. The composer's prompt
  character is no good: it follows the approval mode (`*` in YOLO), and its
  `>` also starts the echoed prompt, which would make the submit verifier
  read a submitted prompt as stranded and press Enter again.
- While a turn runs a line `⠦ Thinking... (esc to cancel, 6s)` animates about
  every 80 ms (largest gap mid-turn: 214 ms). The label can be any loading
  phrase, so the working line is the `(esc to cancel, <n>` suffix, or a
  spinner frame opening a line for when a long phrase wraps that suffix.
  Nothing at rest matches either.
- A tool confirmation (default mode) replaces the composer, stops the
  spinner and the pane goes silent (3.9 s gap), so it reads as idle.

Verified on an isolated instance from this branch: a YOLO turn emitted one
session:working (+170 ms) and one session:idle (2.5 s after the last output);
a default-mode turn went working -> idle while the confirmation waited ->
working once allowed -> idle at the end; after a server restart four restored
gemini panes went busy -> idle in about 4 s; a fresh launch settled in 3 s.

The launch-settle and uncharacterised-CLI tests that used gemini as their
example of a CLI without work detection now use grok and deepseek.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Codeman maintainer
2026-10-09 03:37:41 +02:00
parent f3b2080e69
commit 7d8c188f83
6 changed files with 192 additions and 18 deletions
+6 -1
View File
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ output. The other CLIs expose no equivalent.
| Respawn cycling and unattended runs | Yes | Yes |
| Cron jobs | Yes | Yes |
| Docker cases, remote SSH cases | Yes | Yes |
| Precise idle detection | Yes | Codex, Pi, OpenCode and OMP: same screen check, via their own prompt and working line. DeepSeek: reports its state itself. Others: output stabilization, coarser |
| Precise idle detection | Yes | Codex, Pi, OpenCode, OMP and Gemini: same screen check, via their own prompt and working line. DeepSeek: reports its state itself. Others: output stabilization, coarser |
| Auto-resume when a usage limit resets | Yes | No |
| Plan usage chip | Yes | No |
| Approvals Inbox | Yes | DeepSeek yes; others no |
@@ -153,6 +153,11 @@ needs `GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT`, `GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS`, and
`GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI`. That is the loosest allowlist entry in Codeman and it affects
only the CLI you spawned yourself.
Working and idle come from the screen: while a turn runs, Gemini CLI draws a spinner line
(`⠦ Thinking... (esc to cancel, 6s)`) above its composer, and Codeman reads that. A tool
confirmation that waits for you shows as idle. Before 1.36.0 a Gemini session showed as
working for good after its first turn.
### Antigravity
Google's successor to the consumer Gemini CLI, invoked as `agy`. It keeps all of its state