Google Engineer Fired for Developing Viral CLI Tool; Codex and Others Compete to Hire Him

Google engineer Justin Poehnelt was fired in June 2026 for developing and open-sourcing the popular Google Workspace CLI (gws) tool, which garnered nearly 30k stars on GitHub and topped Hacker News. Google's legal department investigated the use of Google's logo and brand colors in the project repository, leading to his termination. Ironically, two days before his firing, Google announced at Cloud Next 2026 that it would release an official Workspace CLI.

Event Timeline

• Project Explosion: Poehnelt, a nearly 7-year veteran of Google's DevRel team, released the gws tool in March 2026. Written in Rust, it dynamically reads Google Discovery Service at runtime to auto-generate commands covering all Workspace services (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, etc.), and includes over 40 AI Agent skill files outputting structured JSON. The project quickly topped Hacker News (953 points, 285 comments) and surpassed 28k GitHub stars.
• Internal Reaction: Google Cloud AI Director Addy Osmani promoted the tool on X, and managers and directors sought Poehnelt's design insights. However, the legal department intervened, questioning the use of Google's logo and brand colors in the repository. Despite the project being hosted under Google's official GitHub organization, Poehnelt was fired.
• Official Follow-up: Two days before his termination, Google announced at Cloud Next 2026 (over 32k attendees) the upcoming release of an official Workspace CLI with largely overlapping functionality.

Reactions

• Poehnelt's View: Poehnelt shared his experience on X, garnering over 4 million views. He believes the real reason was not the logo issue but that "Workspace and certain leaders are afraid of being disrupted by AI Agents." He wrote: "This fear isn't about my CLI specifically, but a broader concern—what AI Agents mean for Workspace."
• Industry Support: Peter Steinberger, father of OpenClaw, retweeted and mocked: "Google fired the person who made Google Workspace CLI because he made Google Workspace CLI. Lucky for me, Google can't fire me." He immediately invited Poehnelt to join Codex. CEOs of OpenRouter, Vercel, and others also publicly extended offers.
• Public Sentiment: Many netizens criticized Google for "killing the goose that lays the golden eggs." Former employees accused Cloud leadership of "playing politics and building empires."

Talent Exodus Context

• Concurrent Departures: Addy Osmani (14-year Google veteran, head of Chrome and Cloud AI) also left around the same time. Noam Shazeer, core author of the Transformer paper and co-lead of Gemini, jumped to OpenAI on June 18. Nobel laureate and AlphaFold creator John Jumper joined Anthropic on June 20. Gemini core developers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel also moved to Anthropic.
• Market Impact: The talent exodus caused Alphabet's stock to drop nearly 7% intraday, closing down over 5%, its worst single-day performance in nearly a year.

Technical Highlights

• Design Philosophy: gws adopts an "Agent-first" approach, distinguishing Human DX and Agent DX. Agent DX outputs structured JSON, supports field masks to reduce data volume, NDJSON pagination streaming, dry-run simulation, and input validation to prevent injection.
• Architecture: A two-stage parsing strategy reads Discovery Documents at runtime and caches them, dynamically building a command tree. It includes over 100 built-in Agent Skills (SKILL.md files) covering all APIs and common workflows.
• Significance: The tool transforms Workspace from "manual user operation" to "AI Agent automated execution" infrastructure, directly challenging Google's existing product model.