Jules, our asynchronous coding agent

https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/jules-now-available/

by meetpateltech • 12 months ago

339 227 12 months ago

blog.google

oblio• 12 months ago

What does this compete with?

felipemesquita• 12 months ago

The codex thing inside ChatGPT, the copilot thing in the github web ui

span_• 12 months ago

Codex by openai

joshdick• 12 months ago

Claude Code

loloquwowndueo2• 12 months ago

They even had to choose a French-sounding name to make the comparison clear?

mattnewton4• 12 months ago

No Gemini-cli competes with that, this competes with the web-interface-around-agent-with-it’s-own-machine space,

not the pair-programming-on-your-machine space I would put the cli tools in

throwup2383• 12 months ago

OpenAI Codex, Github Copilot Agents, Cursor Background Agents, and Devin.

rmonvfer• 12 months ago

Is Devin still alive?

esafak9• 12 months ago

Hosted agents, followed by local CLI agents.

franze• 12 months ago

the agent is good, the UI horrible.

"Usability declines in inverse proportion to the number of vice-presidents who sign the release notes." Law of Interface Inversion

esafak9• 12 months ago

No signatures: https://jules.google/docs/changelog/

jebronie• 12 months ago

its way better than the github thing in my experience it produces usable PRs

0x4575• 12 months ago

A blind monkey smashing a keyboard can produce better PR and PR reviews than GitHub copilot. I don't get how they managed to make copilot so bad.

theusus• 12 months ago

Used it didn't like it. Claude Code is far better because the active collaboration part.

r0fl• 12 months ago

I thought I would like it based on the pitch but gave up using it after just a handful of times

Liking kiro a lot these days

ghawkescs• 12 months ago

How long is the queue for invites to Kiro these days? I joined the wait-list right after it launched.

mvieira383• 12 months ago

Different use cases, IMO. With a cloud solution like this it's much easier to ask it to solve whatever issues or backlog tasks you have and continue working on your own on your main project. I don't think this is a solution for vibecoding or for the AI copilot crowd

throwup2383• 12 months ago

It is also great for on the go when you only have a phone. I frequently fire off agents when I get a new idea or some backlog I want to tackle while I’m the gym - the 2 minute rest periods between sets is perfect to write up a prompt or review some changes.

beefnugs• 12 months ago

So are there just 100 developers sitting in the edge of their seats constantly refreshing all the spy reports from other AI companies, waiting to copy the exact same idea and shit it out at top speed?

Or is it more of a vibe code thing where every new feature from everyone is recreated by every other company in a matter of days?

Do they even realize they are destroying their own industry economics? The only reason anyone uses big tech is because there are no alternatives

mvieira383• 12 months ago

Good to see competition for Codex. I think cloud-based async agents like Codex and Jules are superior to the Claude Code/Aider/Cursor style of local integration. It's much safer to have them completely isolated from your own machine, and the loop of sending them commands, doing your own thing on your PC and then checking back whenever is way better than having to set up git worktrees or any other type of sandbox yourself

mattnewton4• 12 months ago

Getting the environment set up in the cloud is a pain vs just running in your environment imo. I think we’ll probably see both for the foreseeable future but I am betting on the worse-is-better of cli tools and ide integrations winning over the next 2 years.

drdrey• 12 months ago

with something like github copilot coding agent it's really not, the environment setup is just like github actions

MattGaiser• 12 months ago

It’s surprisingly good. If you try Copilot in GitHub, it has had no issues setting up temporary environments every single time in my case.

No special environment instructions required.

mvieira383• 12 months ago

It took me like half an afternoon to get set up for my workplace's monorepo, but our stack is pretty much just Python and MongoDB so I guess that's easier. I agree, it's a significant trade-off, it just enables a very convenient workflow once it's done, and stuff like having it make 4 different versions with no speed loss is mind-blowing.

One nice perk on the ChatGPT Team and Enterprise plans is that Codex environments can be shared, so my work setting this up saved my coworkers a bunch of time. I pretty much just showed how it worked to my buddy and he got going instantly

xiphias22• 12 months ago

I agree but I just love codex-1 model that is powering codex and see pro 2.5 as inferior.

It's interesting that most people seem to prefer local code, I love that it allows me to code from my mobile phone while on the road.

jondwillis5• 12 months ago

What kind of things are you coding while “on the road”? Phone addiction aside, the UX of tapping prompts into my phone and either collaborating with an agent, or waiting for a background agent to do its thing, is not very appealing.

muratsu• 12 months ago

hey I am exactly the same, is there a way to reach out to you? I would love to chat more about mobile coding

vb-84483• 12 months ago

It's safer have them completely isolated, but it's slower and more expensive.

Sometimes I just realize that CC going nuts and stop it before it goes too far (and consume too much). With this async setup, you may come after a couple of hours and see utter madness(and millions of tokens burned).

unshavedyak• 12 months ago

Completely agree. I also want to tightly control the output, and the more it just burns and burns the more i become overwhelmed by a giant pile of work to review.

A tight feedback loop is best for me. The opposite of these async models. At least for now.

itsalotoffun2• 12 months ago

You need a supervisor agent to periodically check the progress and `if (madness) halt(1)`

ahmadyan2• 12 months ago

Codex/Jules are taking a very different approach than CC/Curser,

There used to be this thesis in software of [Cathedral vs Bazaar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar), the modern version of it is you either 1) build your own cathedral, and you bring the user to your house. It is a more controlled environment, deployment is easier, but also the upside is more limited and also shows the model can't perform out-of-distribution. OpenAI has taken this approach for all of its agentic offering, whether ChatGPT Agent or Codex.

2) the alternative is Bazaar, where you bring the agent to the user, and let it interact with 1000 different apps/things/variables in their environment. It is 100x more difficult to pull this off, and you need better model that are more adaptable. But payoff is higher. The issues that you raised (env setup/config/etc) are temporary and fixable.

throwup2383• 12 months ago

Cursor now has “Background Agents” which do the same thing as Codex/Jules.

highfrequency• 12 months ago

Can you elaborate on how Codex vs. CC maps onto this cathedral vs. bazaar dichotomy? They seem fairly similar to me.

robluxus• 12 months ago

This is the actual essence of CATB, has very little to with your analogy:

-----

The software essay contrasts two different free software development models:
The cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers. GNU Emacs and GCC were presented as examples.
The bazaar model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, as the inventor of this process. Raymond also provides anecdotal accounts of his own implementation of this model for the Fetchmail project

-----

Source: Wikipedia

conartist6• 12 months ago

CATB was about how to organize people to tackle major community/collaborative efforts in a social system that is basically anarchy.

Both situations you've described are Cathedrals in the CATB sense: all dev costs are centralized and communities are impoverished by repeating the same dev work over and over and over and over.

stillsut• 12 months ago

I think the Github-PR model for agent code suggestions is the path of least resistance for getting adoption from today's developers working in an existing codebase. It makes sense: these developers are already used to the idea and the ergonomics of doing code reviews this way.

But pushing this existing process - which was designed for limited participation of scarce people - onto a use-case of managing a potentially huge reservoir of agent suggestions is going to get brittle quickly. Basically more suggestions require a more streamlined and scriptable review workflow.

Which is why I think working in the command line with your agents - similar to Claude and Aider - is going to be where human maintainers can most leverage the deep scalability of async and parallel agents.

is way better than having to set up git worktrees or any other type of sandbox yourself

I've built up a helper library that does this for you for either aider or claude here: https://github.com/sutt/agro. And for FOSS purposes, I want to prevent MS, OpenAI, etc from controlling the means of production for software where you need to use their infra for sandboxing your dev environment.

And I've been writing about how to use CLI tricks to review the outputs on some case studies as well: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/i...

pjm3312• 12 months ago

FWIW you can run Claude code async via GitHub actions and have it work on issues that you @ mention it from - there’s even a slash command in Claude code that will automatically set up your repository with the GitHub action config to do this

mkw5053• 12 months ago

I also just got an email tonight for early access to try CC in the browser. "Submit coding tasks from the web." "Pick up where Claude left off by teleporting tasks to your terminal" I'm most interested to see how the mobile web UI/UX is. I frequently will kick something off, have to handle something with my toddler, and wish I could check up on or nudge it quickly from my phone.

diggan• 12 months ago

I think cloud-based async agents like Codex and Jules are superior to the Claude Code/Aider/Cursor style of local integration

Ideally, a combination of both I feel like would be a productive setup. I prefer the UI of Codex where I can hand-off boring stuff while I work on other things, because the machines they run Codex on is just too damn slow, compiling Rust takes forever and it needs to continuously refetch/recompile dependencies instead of leveraging caching, compared to my local machine.

If I could have a UI + tools + state locally while the LLM inference is the only remote point, the whole workflow would end up so much faster.

natch4• 12 months ago

Why is the pricing so well hidden? I had to ask Grok. Google would not show even the overview page unless I click-to-agree to all their terms and conditions.

OK found a good page for the plans here… ymmv if you're not logged in:

https://gemini.google/subscriptions/

rvnx• 12 months ago

It should be illegal to say "> Highest task limits" or change them retroactively like Claude or Cursor did

unreal6• 12 months ago

In the middle of a billing cycle (which could be a month or year, in some cases), I would agree

jondwillis5• 12 months ago

had to use grok

Had to implies that you pointed other models at the task and they failed, or that grok is your go-to model for this.

Can you explain?

natch4• 12 months ago

Yes the reason Grok is the go to is that it has live data from X conversations so it’s very good for finding answers backed by threads on brand new topics.

In the old days we would search twitter for “sirens Potrero hill” and find users talking about what they were seeing live out their window that was the cause of the siren. Now grok has that same info.

I don’t live on (in?) Potrero hill, just an example.

byefruit• 12 months ago

How is this different from https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli ?

Edit: it seems this is a hosted version. Would be nice if they actually joined up some of their products.

mattnewton4• 12 months ago

Idk, I think this is easier to talk about than “codex” by open ai which means either means the cli or the web interface to an agent with its own computer.

(Or a deprecated code fine tuned model)

esafak9• 12 months ago

Being hosted, it does not have access to your development environment. Its Ubuntu sandbox is quite restricted. https://jules.google/docs/environment/

0x4575• 12 months ago

Jules is web only from my understanding, similar to OpenAI's Codex (web version...)

You give it a task and it produces a PR. While gemini-cli is more like pair programming with AI.

SchizoDuckie5• 12 months ago

Who in their right mind hands off tasks to one of these for their day job? They can never be trusted.

ActionHank• 12 months ago

They can be great for focused tasks with very specific acceptance criteria. Especially in cases where you have broad test coverage that can verify nothing broke.

We already see bots that monitor repos to bump versions. I suspect we will see this expand to handle larger version bumps, minor issues, minor features. Basically junior dev learning tasks.

SchizoDuckie5• 12 months ago

Great. So Junior devs will be useless now. Now how are we going to train more senior devs that know what they're doing?

esafak9• 12 months ago

You have to review their work, the same as any human's. What's the matter, you don't like cheap assistants?

percentcer• 12 months ago

Assistants can be taught

munificent4• 12 months ago

What's the matter, you don't like cheap assistants?

I think the main reason I'm not personally excited about AI is that... no, I don't, actually.

I'm in my late 40s. I have had many opportunities to move into management. I haven't because while I enjoy working with others, I derive the most satisfaction from feeling like I'm getting my hands dirty and doing work myself.

Spending the entire day doing code reviews of my army of minions might be strictly more productive, but it's not a job I would enjoy having. I have never, for a second, felt some sort of ambitious impulse to move up the org chart and become some sort of executive giving marching orders.

The world that AI boosters are driving towards seems to me to be one where the only human jobs left are effectively middle management where the leaf nodes of the org chart are all machines. It may the case that such a world has greater net productivity and the stock prices will go up.

But it's not a world that feels meaningful, dignified, or desirable to me.

SchizoDuckie5• 12 months ago

I can trust humans to do as I ask.

vb-84483• 12 months ago

They will produce PR(and probably shitty code) on a rate you are not able to review XD

swat535• 12 months ago

An assistant is an intelligent human being who understands basic concepts, they are not a slot machine like AI is.

My experience using these is that it makes more time to reverse engineer the bloat they spill out than to write the thing myself.

God help you if you attempt to teach them anything, they will say "You're absolutely right!" and then continue churning out the same broken code.

Then you have to restart with a "fresh" context and give them the requirements from scratch and hope that this time they come up with something better.

jmtulloss2• 12 months ago

https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2025-06-14-coding-agents-cro...

The former CTO of stripe, for one.

They show you the code they produce. Why wouldn’t you trust it after reading it?

asadm• 12 months ago

i do. ALL. THE. TIME.

BoredPositron• 12 months ago

The naming is pathetic.

esafak9• 12 months ago

Jules the octopus!

Retr0id• 12 months ago

over 140,000 code improvements shared publicly.

Where can I check them out?

esafak9• 12 months ago

The daily task limit went down from 60 to 15 (edit: on the free plan) with this release. Personally I wasn't close to exhausting the limit because I had to spend time going back and forth, and fixing its code.

To communicate with the Jules team join https://discord.gg/googlelabs

lacoolj2• 12 months ago

That's odd cuz my daily task limit went up to 100.

Are you on Google Pro or using it free?

Also, I've found that even with 60, over an entire full day/night of using it for different things, I never went over 10 tasks and didn't feel like I was losing anything. To be clear, I've used this every weekend for months and I mean that I've never gone over 10 on any one day, not overall.

15 should be plenty, especially if you aren't paying for it. I will likely never use 100 even on my busiest of weekends

arcticfox• 12 months ago

My problem with Codex is it can't really run Docker. Can Jules or any other competitor?

achierius• 12 months ago

Claude Code can.

0x4575• 12 months ago

Entirely different product. Claude Code runs on my machine, Jules runs on some sandboxed ubuntu vm in GCP without any input (beyond high level user story promp)

timrogers• 12 months ago

PM for GitHub Copilot coding agent here!

Our asynchronous coding agent can run Docker in its GitHub Actions-powered development environment - for example it could start a Dockerized web server.

You can learn more about the agent at https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/coding-agent/cod....

purpleidea• 12 months ago

I've been playing with it, and I've been generally not impressed.

There are both obvious annoying UI bugs (which should be easy to fix unless they vibe coded the whole thing) and the output of the tool isn't very good for anything but the simplest problems.

If the model was really good, I'd love this, but it's not.

xnx2• 12 months ago

If the model was really good, I'd love this, but it's not.

Might be worth trying again now:

"Jules now uses the advanced thinking capabilities of Gemini 2.5 Pro to develop coding plans, resulting in higher-quality code outputs"

turblety2• 12 months ago

Why has Google totally overcomplicated their subscription models?

Looking at "Google AI Ultra" it looks like I get this Jules thing, Gemini App, Notebook, etc. But if I want Gemini CLI, then I've got to go through the GCP hellscape of trying to create subscriptions, billing accounts then buying Google Code Assist or something, but then I can't get the Gemini app.

Then of course, this Google AI gives me YouTube Premium for some reason (no idea how that's related to anything).

esher• 12 months ago

Watch YouTube while AI is coding for you.

weakwire• 12 months ago

That’s actually great!

gman83• 12 months ago

I was wondering about this too, and apparently they're working on integrating it, so the Google AI Pro/Ultra subscriptions will also give API/CLI credits or something -- https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/1427

coredog64• 12 months ago

Then of course, this Google AI gives me YouTube Premium for some reason (no idea how that's related to anything).

One of the common tests I've seen for the Google models specifically is understanding of YT videos: Summarization, transcription, diarization, etc. One of their APIs allows you to provide a YT video ID rather than making you responsible for downloading the content yourself.

neuronexmachina• 12 months ago

Tangentially, last week I asked Gemini's research mode to write up a strategy guide for a videogame based on a 20-episode "masterclass" youtube series. It did a surprisingly good job.

absurddoctor• 12 months ago

But unlike some other pieces of the Ultra subscription you can’t share YouTube premium with family. So now I have both and Google has suggested a few times that I shouldn’t be doing that.

ryandvm• 12 months ago

And God forbid you were an early Google for Domains adopter and have your own Google Workspace account because nothing fucking works right for those poor saps.

rkomorn5• 12 months ago

Add "moving to a different country while owning an account that started as Google Apps for Domains" for a little more flavor.

"Can't share the subscription because the other person in your family is in another country."

Okay guess I'll change countr- "No you can't change your Google Workspace account's country."

slabity• 12 months ago

You think that's bad? I had my own Google Workspace account with Google Domains and then foolishly linked my Google Fi cellphone to it.

Trying to get that stuff resolved was such a pain that I eventually had to ask a friend who knew someone that worked at Google for assistance. Their support team had absolutely no public contact info available. I eventually managed to get my data and migrate the services I actually use (Google Fi and Youtube) to a non-workspace account.

The funny thing is that a few months later they tried to send a $60 bill to collections because they reopened the account for 2 days for me to migrate things off. I was originally going to pay it to just get them off my back, but Google's own collections agency wouldn't let me pay through card or check or anything. The only way I could pay was to "Log into your Google Workspace account" which NO LONGER EXISTED.

Now it's just an amusing story about incompetence to look back on, but at the time it was stressful because I almost lost my domains, cell phone number, and email addresses all at once. Now I never trust anything to a single company.

zoba2• 12 months ago

Yes! This me and it is mind boggling how poor the experience is.

jacksnipe• 12 months ago

I wonder if bundling it with ai is to deal with that pesky internal issue where engineers are always trying to turn off ads for their yt accounts

thrtythreeforty• 12 months ago

Is this really a thing? That's hilarious

BlackjackCF• 12 months ago

The cynic in me thinks that complicated subscriptions schemes are an effective way to make people overpay for stuff.

JonathanMerklin• 12 months ago

I think it's possible that that may be an additional benefit (for Google), but to me it seems overwhelmingly more likely that the main explanation here is Conway's Law.

SchemaLoad3• 12 months ago

I'd guess Google is just a million disconnected teams with their own products and product managers and pricing schemes, and no one thinking about the overall strategy or cohesion.

rsanheim• 12 months ago

Because their main business is selling ads and maintaining their stranglehold on that market via analytics, chrome, Chromebook, android, SSO via google, etc.

The dev focused products are a sideshow amongst different fiefdoms at google. They will never get first billing or focus.

Lucasoato• 12 months ago

We’ve been trying to understand Google Workspace subscriptions but it’s a complete mess. It’s not even clear which plans include GMail and which don’t, Google used to be the simple but great company, why do you feel so stranded when subscribing to their product now?

When you enter Google Cloud you end up in a shroud of darkness in which admins can’t see the projects created by users.

I’m the admin for our Google Workspace, I can’t even tell if we have access to Google AI studio or not, their tutorials are complete bullshit, the docs are just plain wrong because they reference to things that are not reflected in the platform.

I had to switch back to English because their automated translations are so awful, didn’t they really think to at least let one person review once each document before releasing it to the public?!

It’s a 450 billion dollars company and they can’t realize that they added so many layers of confusion that 99% of their users won’t need. The biggest issue is that they won’t solve this anytime soon, they dug themselves into a limitless pit.

codazoda• 12 months ago

An old boss of mine used to say, “There’s money in confusion.”

ygouzerh• 12 months ago

It looks like there are two different entities inside Google who provides AI products.

From a professional context for example, we are using in my company both Google Workspaces and GCP.

With Google Workspaces, we have including in our subscription Gemini, Veo 3, Jules, etc. Everything is included in a subscription models, rate-limited but unlimited. The main entrypoint is gemini.google.com

However, everytime we need to use the API, then we need to use GCP. It gives us access to some more advances models like Veo3 instead of Veo3-fast, and more features. It's unlimited usage, but pay-as-you-go. The main entrypoint is GCP Vertex AI

And both teams, Google Workspaces and GCP are quite separate. They often don't know really well what the others teams provides.

snthpy• 12 months ago

Thanks. That explains some things.

OT question about Google Workspaces: What's the difference between My Drive, Shared Drives, and "Workspaces"? When would I want to use each in a team setup?

veonik• 12 months ago

To add to the confusion, you can also just use Gemini via API (without Vertex AI). It shows up as a separate item in billing.

In the (latest, of three different) Go SDK, you can use either Vertex AI or Gemini. But not all features exist in either. Gemini can use uploaded files as attachments, and Vertex AI can use RAG stores, for example. Gemini uses API key based authentication, while Vertex AI uses the traditional credentials. All in the same SDK.

It's a mess.

stingraycharles• 12 months ago

This sounds like par of the course for Google indeed, multiple teams creating the same products and competing without centralized product management or oversight.

Happens with their other products as well, eg their meet / chat / voice / hangouts products.

dostick• 12 months ago

If it’s two competing, then we know what’s next - one of them to be killed.

navinsylvester• 12 months ago

I subscribed to ultra to give deep think a try but i will not extend it even a day for all the other packaging put together by someone who might be working for a competitor. Who does these things and the fragmentation is crazy as mentioned. Chinese deep agents may be entrenched(just kidding), its crazy that someone up the ladder is so off point and not worry about losing his job.

artdigital5• 12 months ago

You're forgetting the 'Google Developer Premium' subscription ($300/y) which also bundles Gemini Code Assist / CLI, some Vertex credits, but none of the other Gemini things

One can make an argument that other Gemini stuff shouldn't be in there because it's not dev related, but Jules at least should

turblety2• 12 months ago

Oh gees another subscription. This Google Developer Premium does look closer to something I would pay for, but really I just want something that gives me everything in a single subscription, that I can use. Like Claude, OpenAI or most other services on the planet.

zoba2• 12 months ago

They block me from subscribing because I have a custom domain for my personal email. I’d gladly give them money but they say “Sign up with your personal email” when I try to subscribe. Such poor design

slightwinder• 12 months ago

At this point, I'm not sure whether Google is just full of people trolling the world, or people so smart and unworldly that they are trolling themselves. The website for Jules has a section for plans, yet it's neither mention the price, nor which actual plan they are talking about or where I can find those f**ing plans, not even a link. This is just ridiculous. Has Google already replaced all their people with AI?

discordance• 12 months ago

I think you're holding it wrong.

I installed Gemini CLI today, went to AI studio, got a free Gemini 2.5 Pro API key (without setting up billing or a credit card) and auth'd with Gemini CLI using the key. Took like 30 seconds. Unfortunately the results were much poorer than what I've been getting with Claude Code.

dvngnt_• 12 months ago

How long do we think it will take for google to rename this like the did from Bard > Gemini

UncleOxidant2• 12 months ago

What does it mean by "asynchronous coding agent" exactly? They don't go into any details there. Like how does this differ from Gemini CLI? Is this more of a pass a high level idea to it and then go on vacation sort of thing? If so, I don't see how that can't end badly.

nemomarx• 12 months ago

give high level user stories to it > it writes code and tests and etc for several hours > returns to you when it thinks it's done for you to review a pull request or etc

UncleOxidant2• 12 months ago

I'm afraid that's a hard nope. Gemini CLI is already doing stuff I don't want it to unless I'm very careful to keep it on a short leash.

ramoz5• 12 months ago

There is only one true agent in 2025, Claude Code.

That said, Gemini is very powerful for it's quality long-context capabilities: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1miweuv/comment/n...

the_sleaze_• 12 months ago

Thinking the same. I don't want Github approval process to sit in between me and the changes - the killer feature of claude code is being able to head it off as it starts to go down a bad path, and to code myself in between its steps.

Do you let juniors complete full features without asking questions or make them check in when they get flustered?

jondwillis5• 12 months ago

I do want to try out some background agents, but from my experience with Cursor’s (frontier model agents) frequency of going off the rails despite having rules and context to help avoid producing slop, I can’t see background agents being that generally useful yet.

patrickhogan12• 12 months ago

I agree with you at this point. Even though Google is performing well on benchmarks and releasing impressive models like World Models Genie 3, the Gemini CLI suggestions/changes feel overly formulaic. Almost like its priorities are that of an OCD coder that cares more about tabs vs spaces instead of building a useful feature. For example, in a recent project, Google CLI spent all of my token allotment for that day on trivial tasks like tweaking ESLint configs or modularizing code that didn't need modularization.

In contrast, Claude Code seems to interpret my prompts better and helps me ship real product features for users.

Maybe it’s a system prompt issue. Its likely my prompting causing the problem. But Claude Code seems to understand my intent better.

ramoz5• 12 months ago

It's how these models/their-harnesses (e.g. the Claude Code js program) are being trained together in the RL stages.

I think the software is now a very important part of the training process. Which is why I think frontier labs are only capable of shipping "actual" agents.

Anthropic has figured something out here that others have not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816424

dash2• 12 months ago

Perhaps this is the modern version of "every company ships its own org chart"? Maybe Gemini's priorities are those of a Google engineer, Claude's are those of an engineer at Anthropic....

patrickhogan12• 12 months ago

I’m being down voted. I don’t have an agenda. I’m simply sharing my experience. If you’re getting good results with Gemini CLI as an alternative to Claude Code, please let me know what you’re doing to get that performance.

I’m impressed by Gemini Pro 2.5’s NLP capabilities. I use that model in production on several projects. My comments are directed only at Gemini CLI. Which FWIW is better than OpenAI Codex CLI, but much worse (for me) than Claude Code.

Even with Pro, the strict token limits combined with the model's tendency to add unrequested modifications means I run out of tokens before completing my intended tasks. Others have the same issue https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/4300

pjm3312• 12 months ago

Source graph amp is pretty good as well albeit lacking a lot of the polish and features of Claude code

But I sometimes reach for it for code review in particular since it calls out to o3 via its “oracle” tool

ramoz5• 12 months ago

o3 is a great oracle I use as well - in my dumb reddit/theater mode I mention that.

I'm building integrations for both Claude Code and AMP! AMP also provides really important features of a harness that others haven't quite caught up on. OpenCode, sort of, but that is driven in a bit of a cultish open source way.

kundi• 12 months ago

Tried both Jules and Gemini CLI, heavily advertised and disappointing. Running it on any slightly more complex codebase, it will crash every few iterations and then complain I have drained all the credits (although it hasn’t done anything yet), not close to live up any basic expectations to their advertised generosity. Disappointing experience

lacoolj2• 12 months ago

I've used this tool for a few months now and have been pretty impressed by it. It handles large quantities of tasks very well and is good at making tests for very specific/isolated functions.

I have found it is not very good when trying to make new projects with different react libraries, inside of existing projects (for instance, my admin UI that I had it place inside of my existing server project).

If you start noticing it change directories and move around and delete/move directories a lot, you should stop the process, reconsider what you're telling it to do and how, then start from scratch with a new task.

p1nkpineapple• 12 months ago

I've been actually kind-of enjoying using Jules as a way of "coding" my side project (a react native app) using my phone.

I have very limited spare time these days, but sometimes on my walk to work I can think of an idea/feature, plan out what I want it to do (and sometimes use the github app to revise the existing code), then send out a few jobs. By the time I get home in the evening I've got a few PRs to review. Most of the code is useless to me, but it usually runs, and means I can jump straight into testing out the idea before going back and writing it properly myself.

Next step is to add automatic builds to each PR, so that on the way home I can just check out the different branches on my phone instead of waiting to be home to run the ios simulator :D

sergeyk• 12 months ago

This is exactly why we built superconductor.dev, which has live app preview for each agent. We support Claude Code as well as Gemini, Codex, Amp. If you want to check it out just mention HN in your signup form and I’ll prioritize you :)

Freedom2• 12 months ago

I hooked up a GitHub repo that's long been abandoned by me and I've just been tinkering with menial stuff - updating dependencies, refactoring code without changing any actual implementation details, minor feature or style updates. It mostly works well for those use cases. I don't know if I'd give it anything important to develop though.

fullstackwife• 12 months ago

Async vibe coding is the new hot thing, I'm also recommending to check GH Copilot Coding Agent (NOT the VScode one)

azath92• 12 months ago

Im not sure about how this translates to react native, AFAICT build chains for apps less optimiside, but using vercel for deployment, neon for db if needed, Ive really been digging the ability for any branch/commit/pr to be deployed to a live site i can preview.

Coming from the python ecosystem, ive found the commit -> deployed code toolchain very easy, which for this kind of vibe coding really reduces friction when you are using it to explore functional features of which you will discard many.

It moves the decision surface on what the right thing to build to _after_ you have built it. which is quite interesting.

I will caveat this by saying this flow only works seamlessly if the feature is simple enough for the llm to oneshot it, but for the right thing its an interesting flow.

timdumol2• 12 months ago

I've tried using Jules for a side project, and the code quality it emits is much worse than GH Copilot (using Claude Sonnet), Gemini CLI, and Claude Code (which is odd, since it should have the same model as Gemini CLi). It also had a tendency to get confused in a monorepo -- it would keep trying to `cd backend && $DO_STUFF` even when it was already in backend, and iterate by trying to change `$DO_STUFF` rather than figure out that it's already in the backend directory.

qingcharles• 12 months ago

I just tried Jules for the first time and it did a fantastic job on reworking a whole data layer. Probably better than I would have expected from Copilot. So.. I'm initially impressed. We'll see how it holds up. I was really impressed with Copilot, but after a lot of use there are times when it gets really bogged down and confused and you waste all the time you would have saved. Which is the story of AI right now.

xnx2• 12 months ago

I've tried using Jules for a side project, and the code quality it emits is much worse than GH Copilot

It might be worth trying again.

"Jules now uses the advanced thinking capabilities of Gemini 2.5 Pro to develop coding plans, resulting in higher-quality code outputs"

timdumol2• 12 months ago

Ah, I missed that. I do vaguely remember that it used to use Flash, but I can't find where I saw it now. Thanks, I'll give it a shot!

ttul• 12 months ago

I used it to make a small change (adding colorful terminal output) to a side project. The PR was great. I am seeing that LLM coding agents excel at various things and suck at others quite randomly. I do appreciate the ease of simply writing a prompt and then sitting back while it generates a PR. That takes very little effort and so the pain of a failure isn't significant. You can always re-prompt.

herval• 12 months ago

I’m I being pedantic or does the jules.google landing page screams “howdie, kids” (the Buschemi meme).

It tries to be funny and authentic, but the cheap looking mascot and low contrast text makes it feel like IBM pretending to be vibecoded startup.

Google has/had a distinct branding with its austere and no-nonsense style in the past, then moved into a clunky-but-not-AWS design aesthetic with GCP (which is still recognizable), and now the AI products just look so completely inconsistent, you can’t even tell they’re from Google

jmtulloss2• 12 months ago

Both from the design scheme and the process it uses to go about its business, Jules seems very inspired by replit

simonpure• 12 months ago

There's now also Gemini CLI GitHub Actions for a similar async experience -

https://github.com/google-github-actions/run-gemini-cli

varispeed• 12 months ago

They could call is Deidre. Missed opportunity.

simonw• 12 months ago

I like the term "asynchronous coding agent" for this class of software. I found a couple of other examples of it in use, which makes me hope it's going to stick:

- https://blog.langchain.com/introducing-open-swe-an-open-sour...

- https://github.com/newsroom/press-releases/coding-agent-for-...

nylonstrung• 12 months ago

I'm pretty sure if you use it will stick Simon

computer23• 12 months ago

Waiting for Google to buy the rights to Ask Jeeves.

rcakebread• 12 months ago

I don't have much experience with using LLMs to help write code, but I gave Jules a try on a new, very unorganized Python project I recently started. About 800 lines of code. It need a major refactoring, so I simply asked Jules to make suggestions.

At a cursory glance, it did a great job. It failed the first time. I gave it the error message and it fixed it. I was shocked it ran after that. Not bad for the free plan.

pmarreck• 12 months ago

Somehow I missed this news from May!

connectsnk• 12 months ago

I am confused. Is this a claude code competitor?

klipklop• 12 months ago

Jules quickly after a few messages/prompts just gets stuck in an endless loop like Gemini-cli does. These two products are really behind Claude Code at producing something beyond the most limited and basic changes.

The worst part is that there is no "STOP" button to quickly get it out of the loop it's stuck in.

ankit219• 12 months ago

This was a version where they wanted to collect data. The next version where gemini cli/jules harness is likely part of the RL training environment and the model would work a lot better. Thats the trajectory of improvement.

zaptheimpaler• 12 months ago

I tried it with this prompt a month or two ago, and again now:

"Write a basic raytracer in Rust that will help me learn the fundamentals of raytracing and 3D graphics programming."

Last time it apparently had working or atleast compiling code, but it refused to push the changes to the branch so I could actually look at it. I asked it, cajoled it, guilted it, threatened it, it just would not push the damn code. So i have no idea if it worked.

This time it wrote some code but wrote 2 main.rs files in separate directories. It split the code randomly across 2 directories and then gets very confused about why it doesn't run right. I explained the problem and it got very lost running around the whole filesystem trying to run the program or cargo in random directories, then gave up.

jsnell• 12 months ago

Yeah, the interaction model around pushing commits is absolutely baffling.

nojito2• 12 months ago

This isn’t a zero shot tool.

Not sure why folks continue to zero shot things.

SchemaLoad3• 12 months ago

These tools are marketed as if you just drop the jira text in and it spits out a finished PR. So it's notable that they don't work the way they are advertised.

nonhaver2• 12 months ago

there exists tools that can zero shot complex tasks (claude/codex). bar has been raised and jules doesn’t stack up. knowing google it will probably improve in due time

jstummbillig• 12 months ago

I don't understand the category. Is getting things right not the goal?

thomasingalls• 12 months ago

It baffles me that I can't give it feedback by commenting on the pr. If it's bothering to offer a create PR workflow, I should be able to course correct targeted bits of code using GitHub's UI, no?

artdigital5• 12 months ago

I tried Jules multiple times during the preview. Almost every week once, and it’s pretty terrible. Out of all the cloud coding assistants, it’s the worst. I honestly thought it was just an experiment that got abandoned and never expected it to actually become a real product, similar to how GH Copilot Spaces was an experiment and turned into Copilot agent.

It does what it wants, often just “finishes” a task preemptively and asking follow ups does nothing besides it rambling for a bit, the env sometimes doesn’t persist and stuff just stops working. For a while it just failed completely instantly because the model was dead or something

Out of the dozen times I tried it, I think I merged maybe one of its PRs. The rest I trashed and reassigned to a different agent.

My ranking

- Claude Code (through gh action), no surprise there

- ChatGPT Codex

- GitHub Copilot Agent

- Jules

I will try it again today to see if the full release changed anything (they give 3 months free trial for previous testers) but if it’s the same, I wouldn’t use or pay for Jules. Just use Codex or GitHub agent. Sorry for the harsh words

nonhaver2• 12 months ago

similar experience. i would put codex over claude personally due to the better rate limits (of which i haven’t hit once yet even on extensive days) but jules was not very good - too messy and i prefer alternative outputs to creating a pull request. like in codex you can copy a git patch which is so incredibly useful to add personal tweaks before committing

jerf• 12 months ago

"I honestly thought it was just an experiment that got abandoned and never expected it to actually become a real product, similar to how GH Copilot Spaces was an experiment and turned into Copilot agent."

My guess is that this is a play for the future. They know that current-day AIs can't really handle this in general... but if you wait for the AI that can and then try to implement this functionality you might get scooped. Why not implement it and wait for the AIs to catch up, is probably what they are thinking.

I'm skeptical LLMs can ever achieve this no matter how much we pour into them, but I don't expect LLMs to be the last word in AI either.

causal• 12 months ago

I still need to try them, but I'm having a hard time envisioning async agents being nearly as useful to me as something local like Claude Code because of how often I need to intervene and ensure it is working correctly.

Won't the loop be pretty long-tail if you're using async agents? Like don't you have to pull the code, then go through a whole build/run/test cycle? Seems really tedious vs live-coding locally where I have a hot environment running and can immediately see if the agent goes off the rails.

artdigital5• 12 months ago

We use async agents heavily. The key is to have proper validation loops, tests and strong/well phrased system prompts, so the agent can quickly see if something is broken or it broke convention.

We have proper issue descriptions that go into detail what needs to be done, where the changes need to be made and why. Break epics/stories down into smaller issues that can be chopped off easily. Not really different to a normal clean project workflow really.

Now for most of the tickets we just assign them to agents, and 10 minutes later pull requests appears. The pull requests get screened with Gemini Code Assist or Copilot Agent to find obvious issues, and github actions check lint, formatting, tests, etc. This gets pushed to a separate test environment for each branch.

We review the code, test the implementation, when done, click merge. Finished.

I can focus on bigger, more complex things, while the agents fix bugs, handle small features, do refactorings and so on in the background. It's very liberating. I am convinced that most companies/environments will end up with a similar setup and this becomes the norm. There really isn't a reason why not to use async agents.

Yeah sure if you give a giant epic to an agent it will probably act out of line, but you don't really have these issues when following a proper project management flow

artdigital5• 12 months ago

Alright, I wanted to give Jules another fair try to see if it improved, but it's still terrible.

- It proposed a plan. I gave it some feedback on the plan, then clicked approve. I came back a few minutes later to "jules is waiting for input from you", but there was nothing to approve or click, it just asked "let me know if you're happy with the plan and I'll get started". I told Jules "I already approved the plan, get started" and it finally started

- I have `bun` installed through the environment config. The "validate config" button successfully printed the bun version, so it's installed. When Jules tries to use bun, I get `-bash: bun: command not found` and it wastes a ton of time trying to install bun. Then bun was available until it asked me for feedback. When I replied, bun went missing again. Now for whatever reason it prefixes every command with "chmod +x install_bun.sh && ./install_bun.sh", so each step it does is installing bun again

- It did what I asked, then saw that the tests break (none were breaking beforehand, our main branch is stable), and instead of fixing them it told me "they're unrelated to our changes". I told it to fix everything, it was unable to. I'm using the exact same setup instructions as with Copilot Agent, Codex and Claude Code. Only Jules is failing

- I thought I'll take over and see what it did, but because it didn't "finish", it didn't publish a branch. I asked it to push a branch, it started doing something and is now in "Thinking" for a while. Seems to be running tests and lint again which are failing. But eventually it published the branch.

At this point I gave up. I don't have time to debug why bun is missing when in the env configuration it is available, or why it vanished in between steps, or figure out why only jules isn't able to properly run our testsuite. It took forever for a relatively small change, and each feedback iteration is taking forever.

I'm sure it'll be great one day, and I'll continue to re-visit it, but for now I'll stick with the other 3 when I need an async agent

venantius• 12 months ago

I feel like this is closest to trying to compete with Charm’s Crush rather than anything else.

mcemilg• 12 months ago

Sorry, but it's garbage for now, at least in my case. From an asynchronous agent, I would expect it to get more done in 10 minutes than a regular agent like claude code. Instead, you give it a task, wait 10 minutes, and get garbage code. Then you provide feedback, wait another 10 minutes, and still get something that doesn't compile. Meanwhile, Claude Code does this in 10 seconds and usually produces runnable code.

siva7• 12 months ago

That's the problem with remote async agents. You can't steer the ship effectively anymore. Sure, i have 10 pull requests in 10 minutes by now, and i'm throwing all of them out because they are crap after i spent about an hour reviewing them.

surrTurr• 12 months ago

why are AI products named so simlar? JetBrains Junie[1], now Jules...

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/

ravenical• 12 months ago

Did they get AI to generate this pixel art? It looks terrible.

loliver666• 12 months ago

Yes of course! Who cares if it looks worse than a human can do, it was free and instant . And that's all that matters in our AI future.

youssefarizk• 12 months ago

Something very strange happened when they first shipped it in preview. It was GOOD, back when the daily limit was 5 requests.

A couple days / weeks later, they announced that the request went up to 60 day (which is way over what anyone actually needs) and the quality dropped instantly. For those short few days at the start, it was actually my favourite coding agent, but somehow they killed it

leosanchez• 12 months ago

I would like for it to have GitHub issues integration.

itsalotoffun2• 12 months ago

Something like this? https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...

akulkarni7• 12 months ago

it does: https://x.com/julesagent/status/1938362811929014654

Jules, our asynchronous coding agent

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