Belated follow up: I was able to install the agy cli directly without the IDE (perhaps this was a change made in the interim).
I ran it last night and it was just fine as a drop-in replacement for my usage. Disappointment averted with minimal effort on my part (it helps that my typical workflow is pretty mundane/close to the defaults).
https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...