Justin Poehnelt, the Google engineer who built the open-source Workspace command-line tool gws, was fired two days after Google said at Cloud Next 2026 that an official Workspace CLI was in development. About six weeks later, Google published that official tool on GitHub, and its core design closely resembled the project Poehnelt had already released.
gws spread quickly through the developer community
According to the source material, Addy Osmani shared gws on March 5, 2026 with the description “built for humans and agents.” The tool offered a single CLI for Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar and other Workspace APIs. Instead of relying on a fixed command set, it generated its interface dynamically at runtime from Google’s own Discovery Service, which meant updates to Google APIs would flow directly into the tool.
gws also shipped with more than 40 AI agent skill files, making AI agent use a core part of the design from day one. The post spread fast in developer circles and, according to the source, brought in thousands of stars and thousands of real users. Poehnelt had worked at Google for nearly seven years as an engineer on the Google Workspace developer relations team. He later referred to Osmani’s post as “the post that got me fired.”
Announcement first, dismissal two days later
Roughly a month after gws took off, Google announced at Cloud Next 2026 that an official Workspace CLI was under development. The source states that Poehnelt was fired two days after that announcement. The article frames the sequence with the term “Sherlocking,” used in tech to describe a platform owner absorbing the main function of an outside product into its own offering.
This case drew extra attention because Poehnelt was not an external developer building around Google. He was a Google employee. His tool gained traction in public, Google disclosed work on a similar official product, and he was then dismissed almost immediately afterward.
Official CLI mirrors the same core approach
About a month and a half after Poehnelt’s dismissal, Google launched its official Workspace CLI on GitHub under googleworkspace/cli. The source says it is written in Rust, released under Apache 2.0, and also builds its command interface dynamically from Discovery Service at runtime. It includes structured JSON output and more than 100 agent skills. Google’s version also adds MCP server integration for Claude Code and Gemini CLI.
The overlap described in the source is substantial. gws reads Discovery Service at runtime, and the official CLI does the same. gws was built around AI agents from the start, and the official positioning uses nearly the same framing. gws included more than 40 skills, while the official version expanded that count to more than 100.
Poehnelt says internal fear drove the decision
Poehnelt’s own reading of the situation is that parts of the Workspace organization and some managers were “afraid of being disrupted.” In his account, the concern was broader than one engineer or one repository. He tied it to a larger anxiety over AI agents replacing existing product surfaces. The source quotes his view directly: “The Workspace org and some leaders, and some projects, are afraid of being disrupted.”
The source also notes a separate corporate consideration: if an employee open-sources a public tool that exposes Google product functionality without full internal approval, termination may not be hard to justify. Still, the timeline remains the center of the story. Google announced the official CLI, Poehnelt was fired two days later, and a closely aligned official release followed soon after.