Gemini CLI v0.39 Adds a Memory Inbox for Reviewing What Your Agent Learned

Gemini CLI v0.39.0 is the new stable release as of April 23. The biggest addition is a persistent memory system: the agent can now extract skills from your sessions, and you can review, edit, or patch those skills through a new /memory inbox command.

This follows v0.38, which shipped subagents and context compression. v0.39 adds the learning layer: not just keeping context across a single session, but retaining what the agent picks up about your workflow and making that accessible.

/memory: A Skill Inbox

Gemini CLI has been building toward persistent agent learning for a few releases. The groundwork was the Skill Extractor, which automatically identifies reusable patterns during your agent sessions — things like how you prefer to structure functions, which test patterns you use, or how you handle specific types of errors.

v0.39 adds the interface to actually work with those extractions. The /memory inbox command opens a queue of skills the agent has pulled from your recent sessions. You can review what it learned, edit anything that’s wrong or too specific, and apply patches to the skill library so the agent’s future behavior reflects what you actually want.

Skill patching matters because automatic extraction is imprecise. The agent might pick up a pattern that was specific to one task and shouldn’t generalize, or it might extract a rule from context that made sense in that session but not broadly. The inbox gives you a chance to curate before those patterns influence future work.

This is a meaningful step toward an agent that actually improves from experience rather than just remembering the contents of the current conversation. Context compression (from v0.38) handles the short-term memory problem. Skill extraction and patching handle the long-term learning problem.

Plan Mode: Confirmation Before Activating Skills

Plan Mode got a security and transparency upgrade in this release. Previously, when an agent session activated a skill, it happened automatically. Now, Plan Mode requires explicit user confirmation before any skill activation.

You can also view the full content of a generated plan before it runs, which was previously only partially visible. Both changes are about keeping humans in the loop as the memory system grows more capable. An agent that can learn from sessions and apply that learning autonomously is a useful agent; one that does so without visibility is a different problem.

The Plan Mode changes also consolidate read-only rule configurations, simplifying the policy setup for users who want to constrain what the agent is allowed to learn or apply.

Display Protocol and Subagent Architecture

The release includes the second and third phases of a tool-controlled display protocol, which lets the agent emit structured visual feedback during execution rather than plain text. The practical effect is that complex multi-step operations produce richer output — progress indicators, structured summaries, and formatted results instead of raw tool call logs.

On the subagent side, v0.39 completes a refactoring that was previewed in the v0.39.0-preview. The three individual subagent tools from v0.38 have been replaced with a unified invoke_subagent tool. If you were using the named subagent tools directly, the interface has changed. The behavioral output is the same, but the call structure is different.

The refactoring also addressed memory leaks in MCP subprocess handling and PTY exhaustion, both of which affected long-running sessions.

Other Fixes

Windows users get faster sandbox initialization through native ACL application instead of the slower legacy approach. Word deletion via Ctrl+Backspace works correctly in Windows Terminal. Mouse click-to-position now works in the terminal. Session resume bugs caused by missing session IDs are fixed.

Updating

Run npm install -g @google/gemini-cli or npx @google/gemini-cli update to get v0.39.0. Full changelog at geminicli.com/docs/changelogs.

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Sources: Gemini CLI v0.39.0 Release Notes, Gemini CLI Changelog, Releasebot