By Derek Perez in Field Notes — Mar 5, 2026

Google Workspace launches an unofficial CLI tool for AI agents

A Google Workspace CLI quietly appeared on GitHub this week from Google's Workspace org. The README explicitly flags it as unofficial — likely a 20%-style side project or early incubation.

Photo by Mitchell Luo / Unsplash

Three days ago, an interesting project from Google's Workspace organization appeared on GitHub, it's called the Google Workspace CLI. The README makes it very clear that this is not an officially supported Google project, which could mean this is a 20%-style googler project (potential supply chain risk: abandonment), or it could just be something experimental that is still in incubation. Ironically, the actual command name they chose was gws, which I speculate could be an insider joke (#iykyk).

What does it do?

An excerpt from the README explains it nicely:

For humans — stop writing curl calls against REST docs. gws gives you --help on every resource, --dry-run to preview requests, and auto‑pagination.

For AI agents — every response is structured JSON. Pair it with the included agent skills and your LLM can manage Workspace without custom tooling.

gws is a Rust-based CLI tool that simplifies and streamlines interacting with Google Workspace's Massive API surface. However, beyond the far better DX implications, there are two very compelling additional features.

Agent skills

The project touts a comprehensive library of Agent Skills that all appear to adhere to the Agent Skills specification, meaning they should work portably across all the popular agentic coding harnesses like Claude Code or OpenCode.

Exposing tools & capabilities via MCP

The CLI can also be utilized via an MCP server interface to provide capability discovery for agents via the widely supported MCP standard. It's appreciated that when using this tool via MCP, you can scope down which tools are available to prevent context bloat, like so:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gws": {
      "command": "gws",
      "args": ["mcp", "-s", "drive,gmail,calendar"]
    }
  }
}

Agents using this server will only be advertised the Drive, Gmail, and Calendar APIs.

Why should I care?

This is a far more token-efficient way to enable agentic tools like OpenClaw or Claude Code to interact with human centric-productivity tools that many of us are widely invested in. If you're using Google Workspace as part of your operations, this is worth looking into.

Last thought

If you had told me that in 2026 we'd be seeing a resurgence of CLI tools that heavily favor TUI-based interactions, I don't know if I would have believed it. However, I think this remains a significant signal that the audience we're developing for is slowly becoming less human.

About the author

Derek Perez is the Founder & Principal Technologist of Limbic Systems, a software consultancy that partners with organizations to design and deploy AI-native software and systems — without losing the human judgment that keeps them grounded. After over a decade of hands-on experience building startups and leading high-performing teams at Google, he partners with founders and operators who need both technical depth and business acumen to navigate what's next. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky, or by email: [email protected].