Focusing our efforts: an update on issue prioritization

[ryanjsalva]

Hey, y'all. 👋

First off, a HUGE thank you to everyone who has contributed to Gemini CLI. Your bug reports, feature requests, and ongoing discussions are invaluable, and they are a critical part of what makes our community great.

As we continue to build, we want to be transparent about our priorities and how we're managing issues in our backlog. Like many of you, we aspire to follow best practices:

1. Make all work visible through tracked issues
2. Fund the highest priority work to maximum capacity
3. Limit the number of works in progress

To live our principles and ship the best dang CLI out there, we need to bring a sharper focus to our active work. Starting this week, we will begin cleaning up our issue backlog.

What We're Focusing On

Our team's priorities are guided directly by our public roadmap. This roadmap reflects our strategic commitments for the upcoming release cycles. Issues and feature requests that align with these committed themes will receive the highest priority from the core team.

Our Approach to Housekeeping

To ensure we can maintain a clear and actionable backlog, we will close or deprioritize certain types of issues:

• Duplicate issues: We will close issues that appear to be duplicates of another existing issue to consolidate discussion in one place. If you believe your issue was closed as a duplicate in error, please feel free to comment on the closed issue and we will be happy to revisit it.
• Stale issues: Any issue that has been inactive for more than two weeks with limited community engagement will be closed. We believe this is enough time for initial discussion. If an issue is still relevant, it can always be reopened with new information.
• Feature requests with limited engagement: We love new ideas, but we must prioritize. Feature requests that don't align with our current roadmap or haven't gained significant community support (e.g., via comments or upvotes) will likely be closed. This helps us be clear about what we are and are not planning to ship in the near-term rather than leave you with uncertainty.
• Issues without reproducible steps: To efficiently fix a bug, we must first be able to reliably reproduce it. Issues that lack clear steps to reproduce the issue and without engagement will be deprioritized. If you've reported a bug, please help us by providing a clear example. We'll add a specific label to these issues and will close them if no repro is provided after a reasonable time.

Our goal is to ensure that our active issues list is a true reflection of the work that is planned or in progress. It helps all contributors stay focused and gives all users a clearer signal of our direction.

If you see an issue you care about being closed with a message from us, please don't hesitate to comment with additional context, a reproducible example, or rally more community feedback. Your engagement makes a huge difference. 🙌

Thank you for your understanding and for being a part of this journey with us and as always if you have any questions or concerns please feel free to reply to this post.

Happy coding.
Ryan