Google just shipped a tool that collapses the awkward distance between your local terminal and Colab's cloud accelerators. The Google Colab CLI lets you provision a GPU, ship a local Python script to it, pull back the artifacts, and tear down the VM, all without ever opening a browser tab. It is also explicitly designed for coding agents to drive on your behalf.

What the CLI actually does

The Colab CLI bridges the gap between your local terminal and remote Colab runtimes, providing a zero-friction execution platform for both developers and AI agents. The surface area is small and Unix-flavored. You can request high-powered GPUs or TPUs instantly with flags like `colab --gpu A100` or `colab --gpu T4`, run scripts with colab exec, and retrieve models, datasets, and replayable .ipynb logs via `colab download` and `colab log`.

Looking at the GitHub repo, the accelerator menu is broader than the blog suggests: `colab new` accepts `--gpu T4|L4|A100|H100` or `--tpu v5e1|v6e1`. There are also file primitives you would expect from an SSH-like workflow: colab ls, colab upload