Google engineer reportedly sacked over viral Workspace CLI AI tool, says: 'The fear wasn't my tool, it was agents as...'

Ex-Googler Justin Poehnelt built the thing his company would announce it wanted two days later.

His Google Workspace CLI climbed to No. 1 on Hacker News, drew thousands of GitHub stars and racked up thousands of users inside a couple of days.

Then Google fired him.

The engineer, who'd spent nearly seven years there, told the story himself this week in an X thread that has since blown past 2.6 million views, and the timing is the part doing the heavy lifting.

Two days before they fired him, Google Cloud Next announced that an official Workspace CLI was coming.He says he wanted it out in his own words, partly to explain it and partly to own it, and partly because saying it aloud is part of how he heals.The tool, called gws, was clever in a way developers immediately got.

Rather than ship a fixed menu of commands, it reads Google's own Discovery Service at runtime and dynamically builds its entire command surface from there.

One interface, both human- and agent-friendly, sitting on top of Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs and every other Workspace API.What actually got him fired, in his wordsPoehnelt doesn't think the CLI itself was the real trigger.

His reading is blunter than that. "I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.

But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace."The branding question is where it gets genuinely murky.

Legal grilled him about why Google's logo and brand colors appeared on a Google Workspace GitHub repository—a question whose irony is somewhat hard to miss given that the project lived under the official googleworkspace GitHub organization.

Critics on Hacker News have a fair point that releasing a project with Google's logo without going through brand approval was a policy violation regardless of how technically impressive it was.

Poehnelt hasn't disputed that the process wasn't followed.

What he disputes is that the branding was the reason rather than the cover for one.He also batted away the assumption that this was a hobby.

Asked on X whether it was a 20% side project, he said no—he was on Workspace Developer Relations, the team whose regular job is building open-source layers and abstractions over Google's APIs.

This was the work.For all that, he carries strikingly little bitterness.

Nearly seven years at Google was a real opportunity, he said, crediting good teammates and a manager who backed him to the end.Why command-line tools became the new battleground for AI agentsThe irony has a structural cause.

The command line has become prime real estate in the agent race, because tools like Claude Code proved agents work best through an interface that's scriptable, inspectable and already installed everywhere.

An agent that can drive Workspace from a terminal is also an agent that can route around Google's own sanctioned surfaces—a real edge for developers, a real headache for whoever owns the product roadmap.Google knows it.

At Cloud Next, CEO Thomas Kurian declared that "the era of the pilot is over.

The era of the agent is here." The uncomfortable footnote is that the engineer who'd already shipped exactly that was on his way out.

He wasn't the only one to leave, either—Addy Osmani, the director whose post Poehnelt calls "the tweet that got me fired," has since departed Google as well.Get the latest technology news and updates.

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