Gemini CLI adds session management so you can resume past work

Google recently detailed Session Management in Gemini CLI, a feature that automatically saves your work sessions so you can return to the same context after closing a terminal.

The announcement says the saved state includes prompts, model responses, tool executions with inputs and outputs, token-usage statistics, and assistant thought/reasoning summaries, and it stores sessions per project so changing directories switches you to that project’s history.

Gemini CLI exposes a built-in session browser via the /resume command, and it also supports resuming from startup with gemini --resume, including selecting a specific session by numeric index (for example, 5) or by UUID.

The post also describes a gemini --list-sessions flag and a retention configuration in settings.json with an example policy of maxAge: "30d" and maxCount: 50.

Google credits open source contributor Christopher Beeson (Piebald AI) with nine-plus pull requests for the feature, and notes it is on by default starting in Gemini CLI v0.20.0+ alongside an update path via npm install -g @google/gemini-cli@latest.