If you build AI agents or developer tools on Google Cloud, stop relying on brittle web-scraping or wrestling with stale LLM training cutoffs.
Build faster, smarter, and with greater confidence using the Google Developer Knowledge API ecosystem, including our gcloud CLI surface, an official agent skill, API Explorer, and multi-language client libraries. Whether you are operating in a command-line terminal, prompting an AI agent, testing requests interactively, or writing production software, our tools deliver Google documentation.
The Developer Knowledge API is Google's official, programmatic source of truth for developer documentation about Google Cloud, Firebase, Android, and more. Designed specifically for modern AI agents, IDE extensions, and automated workflows, it replaces brittle web-scraping with a structured API that serves fresh, Markdown-formatted documentation.
By offering semantic and keyword search, intelligent document chunking, and grounded Q&A capabilities, the API ensures your agents and developer tools remain accurate and token-efficient.
The Developer Knowledge API is indexed frequently to ensure predictable retrieval, fresh documentation, and minimal lag between upstream updates and agent access.
With the Developer Knowledge API interfaces, developers and AI agents can discover, retrieve, and synthesize answers grounded in official Google documentation across terminals, IDEs, and backend codebases.
The Developer Knowledge API gcloud CLI surface integrates official documentation search, retrieval, and grounded Q&A into your command-line environment. It comes pre-installed in Cloud Shell and works across standard Google Cloud SDK installations on Linux, macOS, and Windows without requiring extra plugins or configuration.
Key capabilities and commands:
answer-query`` documents search-chunks``documents describe
gcloud developer-knowledge answer-query --query="How do I create a BigQuery dataset?"
gcloud developer-knowledge documents search-chunks --query="Firestore transactions"
gcloud developer-knowledge documents describe "documents/docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/creating-buckets"
gcloud developer-knowledge answer-query --query="$(cat error.txt)"
To get started with the gcloud CLI, see the gcloud CLI Quickstart.
The Developer Knowledge agent skill establishes a link between AI coding assistants and Google's documentation ecosystem, enabling autonomous tools to access up-to-date technical specifications.
Key Benefits
searchDocumentChunks`` documents.get``answerQuery`` curl).
Configure the agent skill
Configure the skill by running the following CLI helper command in your terminal:
npx skills add google/skills --skill retrieving-developer-knowledge
This command installs the Developer Knowledge agent skill in your project. The skill instructs your assistant how to use the Developer Knowledge MCP server (or fall back to the REST API using curl).
To connect to the MCP server in your IDE, or to configure authentication with Application Default Credentials or an API key, see Connect to the Developer Knowledge MCP server.
The client libraries let you embed documentation retrieval, search, and grounded answer generation into production systems, automated CI/CD pipelines, and enterprise knowledge bots.
Key benefits:
AnswerQuery, SearchDocumentChunks, GetDocument, and BatchGetDocuments.
Supported languages:
Get started by following the Quickstart to set up your environment, install a library, and start retrieving developer documentation.
Code examples:
The following example demonstrates how an AI agent can use the Python client library to fetch the latest product release notes, ensuring its responses are grounded in data beyond its training cutoff:
from google.cloud import developer_knowledge_v1
def FetchMyProductReleaseNotes(my_product_name: str) -> str:
"""Fetches the latest release notes to bridge a model's knowledge cutoff."""
my_api_client = developer_knowledge_v1.DeveloperKnowledgeClient()
my_search_query = f"{my_product_name} latest release notes"
my_request = developer_knowledge_v1.SearchDocumentChunksRequest(
query=my_search_query,
)
my_response = my_api_client.search_document_chunks(request=my_request)
my_release_notes = [my_chunk.text for my_chunk in my_response.chunks]
return "\n".join(my_release_notes)
Code examples across various tasks:
The Google APIs Explorer for the Developer Knowledge API offers an interactive, zero-code interface integrated into Google's developer site, enabling experimentation and verification of API requests and response structures.
Through the APIs Explorer, you can test the following core endpoints:
Ready to integrate Google developer documentation into your workflows and AI tools? Here are a few ways to get started: