He developed the most popular CLI tool for Google, only to get fired.

A Google veteran with seven years of experience was fired because he developed a CLI tool that gained 28,000 stars on GitHub.

After the Google Workspace CLI tool was developed, directors and senior executives within Google lined up to ask how it was made.

Then... the legal department showed up.

"Why does the Google logo appear in the project's GitHub repository?"

Yes, you heard it right. A project developed by members of Google's DevRel team under Google's official GitHub organization was questioned about "why it used Google's brand."

Even more outrageously, after firing the developer, Google immediately released an official version of the same tool called GWS.

The "Father of Lobster" couldn't stand it and came out in support, saying, "Fortunately, Google can't fire me."

Netizens were even more straightforward. They said Google always fails at the last moment... This company isn't short of good things, but every time a good thing emerges, it gets killed off by the company itself.

Before the storm of suppressing developers subsided, Google was hit with a series of bad news about talent leaving.

Two Nobel laureates left within two days, and two core developers of Gemini also jumped ship.

I'm not the only one looking forward to this "Inside Google" situation, right? (doge)

The Outrageous Ending of the 28,000-Star CLI Tool

Let's first talk about what this tool that made Google's legal department act overnight actually does.

For a long time, the APIs of Google Workspace's various services have been fragmented. To call services like Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, and Sheets, you have to connect to the interfaces separately and configure authorization individually.

Especially in 2026, when AI agents were everywhere, there was no convenient tool for agents to operate services like Gmail, Calendar, and Drive.

The core design of the Google Workspace CLI developed by Poehnelt is to dynamically read Google's Discovery Service at runtime and automatically generate corresponding commands.

It encapsulates the APIs of all products in Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Sheets, Chat, and Admin. With just one command, you can complete various operations. All returned data is output in a unified standard JSON format, and it also has more than forty functional modules adapted to AI agents built - in.

Even Google veteran Addy Osmani came to support and praise it.

This director of Google Cloud AI has worked at Google for 14 years and is the core driving force behind Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, and Core Web Vitals.

On March 5, he personally posted to promote it. This post was later called "the tweet that got me fired" by Poehnelt.

No one expected that while the tool became popular and attracted senior management to learn from it, the legal department quickly showed up, holding the developer accountable and putting pressure on him for using Google's logo and brand visuals in the repository without permission.

What's even more ironic is the timeline. Just two days before Poehnelt received the dismissal notice, Google officially announced at the Cloud Next conference that it would launch an official version of the Workspace CLI.

The requirements targeted by this official tool, the AI agent adaptation it features, and the core idea of unified command - line calls are highly consistent with the tool developed by Poehnelt in his spare time.

Osmani, who tweeted to promote the CLI, has also confirmed that he has left Google.

Making someone else's work official and then firing the person. This operation made many onlookers unable to stand it, and they directly called out to Sundar Pichai -

The people who should be fired are those who caused Poehnelt to be fired. This is the culture that Google really needs to eliminate.

Two Nobel Laureates Leave in Two Days

On one hand, the person doing the work was fired. On the other hand, top - notch talents left on their own.

On June 18, Noam Shazeer, a co - inventor of the Transformer, announced that he was leaving Google to join OpenAI.

This is already his second time leaving Google. Last time, he left because he was dissatisfied with Google's overly conservative commercialization strategy and founded Character.AI.

Later, Google spent $2.7 billion to bring him back and arranged for him to co - lead Gemini. But less than two years later, he left again, heading straight for Google's biggest competitor.

Two days later, another bombshell: John Jumper also left and announced that he was joining Anthropic.

He is the leader of the AlphaFold project and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind CEO Hassabis. He had been at Google for nearly nine years.

The drama at Google doesn't end there.

According to Bloomberg, in the past few days, two core developers of Gemini, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, have also jumped to Anthropic.

The news of the continuous loss of top AI talents severely hit market confidence. Google's parent company, Alphabet, tumbled nearly 7% during intraday trading and closed down more than 5%, recording its worst single - day performance in nearly a year.

There's really something going on at Google.

Reference Links:

[1]https://x.com/i/trending/2069559025642205688

[2]https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/24/ai-researchers-continue-to-leave-google-for-its-rivals/

This article is from the WeChat official account "QbitAI". Author: Wen Le. Republished by 36Kr with permission.