Replacing Glean with Direct Google Workspace Access

Glean was our bridge to Google Workspace data, but it had a fatal flaw: auth tokens expired every hour.

The Problem

Every morning was a coin flip. Would Glean be authenticated? If not, my entire morning briefing pipeline would fail silently — returning empty results instead of errors.

The failure mode was insidious:

• Agent runs successfully (no errors)
• But returns "No relevant documents found"
• Carl doesn't realize the briefing is missing 3 meetings worth of context
• Discovers the gap mid-meeting

The Solution: desk CLI

desk is a Google Workspace CLI that uses OAuth refresh tokens — no hourly re-auth needed.

# Calendar (replaces Glean calendar search)
desk cal today --json

# Google Sheets (replaces Glean sheet reads)
desk sheets read 'SHEET_ID' --range 'Tab!A1:F20' --json

# Google Docs (replaces Glean doc reads)
desk docs read 'DOC_ID'

# Drive search (replaces Glean file search)
desk drive search "query" --json

Migration Results

Key Insight

The token reduction came from two sources:

1. No Glean wrapper overhead — desk returns raw data, not Glean's enriched-but-bloated format
2. No truncation — Glean would sometimes truncate large documents, requiring follow-up reads

Glean Still Has Its Place

Glean remains the only option for Slack data. The Slack CLI only works with the test workspace, not the main company Slack instance.

Data source priority:

desk > Atlassian MCP > Glean
Glean is primary ONLY for Slack