Fired from Google for Making Workspace Too Easy to Use: The Story of J. Poehnelt
Justin Poehnelt, for nearly seven years in the Developer Relations team of Google Workspace, was fired for creating a tool that was too successful: a CLI (command-line interface) capable of unifying command-line access to Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and other Workspace APIs. The project, called gws, reached the top spot on Hacker News, garnered thousands of stars on GitHub, and attracted many users in just a few days.
Two months ago I was fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI. It went viral, hit #1 on Hacker News, gained thousands of GitHub stars and many thousands of actual users in just a couple of days. It was an incredible, confusing journey, from directors and leaders asking...
pic.twitter.com/VprDW9DO9y
-- Justin Poehnelt (@JPoehnelt)
June 23, 2026
The timing made the situation even more bitter: two days before his firing, Google announced at Cloud Next 2026 the development of an official CLI for Workspace, effectively overlapping with Poehnelt's personal project.
From a Beloved Internal Project to Legal Trouble
When the tool went viral, according to the narrative shared by Poehnelt on X, managers and executives initially asked what the company could learn from the project. Then the legal department arrived, with questions about how the Google logo and brand colors ended up on the GitHub repositories of the tool.
For Poehnelt, the real issue is not about his CLI itself, but the fear, widespread among the Workspace leadership, of what AI agents represent for the product. A CLI that makes Workspace APIs easily readable by an automated agent is, in fact, an infrastructure that bypasses the official channels through which Google would prefer to handle third-party integration.
The discussion surrounding the incident has nearly 600 comments at the time of writing. Part of the users, including former Google employees, focuses on the procedural issue: the company has specific rules for releasing open-source software, and the point of contention is whether Poehnelt complied with them.
He claims that the process "is not clearly documented and changes constantly," and that he received authorization through the internal launch system, with technical approval given by his own manager. Other commentators respond by citing the public documentation on Google's open-source releases, which they believe leaves no room for ambiguity.
On the branding front, some observers point out that the Google logo automatically appears on all repositories within the GitHub organization googleworkspace, a level-setting that Poehnelt did not choose, and that the project nonetheless includes the standard disclaimer stating that it is not an officially supported Google product.
A Case That Speaks to AI, Not Just Internal Rules
Several comments nostalgically recall the famous 20% time, the time that Google historically allowed employees for personal projects: for some, the firing demonstrates that this culture is now dead. Others rebut that the 20% time never meant skipping required launch reviews, asserting that the issue remains the procedure, not the initiative itself.
The point upon which much of the commentary converges is that the incident primarily illustrates the tension between developer relations, which exist to make platforms more accessible, and product teams, which want to control timing, branding, and the narrative of every new feature. A CLI that executes API calls cleanly may no longer be seen as merely a convenience tool: it is infrastructure ready for AI agents, and this makes it strategically sensitive. Nonetheless, Poehnelt's tool remains online on GitHub, available for anyone who wishes to use it.