[HN Gopher] Jules, our asynchronous coding agent
___________________________________________________________________
Jules, our asynchronous coding agent
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 192 points
Date : 2025-08-06 16:05 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| oblio wrote:
| What does this compete with?
| felipemesquita wrote:
| The codex thing inside ChatGPT, the copilot thing in the github
| web ui
| span_ wrote:
| Codex by openai
| joshdick wrote:
| Claude Code
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| They even had to choose a French-sounding name to make the
| comparison clear?
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| dont shoot the messenger, but it's supposed to be like a
| "butler sounding name"
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Got it - and Jenkins and Hudson were already taken.
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| Wadsworth is free. brb startup
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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
| throwup238 wrote:
| OpenAI Codex, Github Copilot Agents, Cursor Background Agents,
| and Devin.
| rmonvfer wrote:
| Is Devin still alive?
| hiatus wrote:
| Yes, and Cognition AI bought Windsurf.
| esafak wrote:
| Hosted agents, followed by local CLI agents.
| franze wrote:
| 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
| esafak wrote:
| No signatures: https://jules.google/docs/changelog/
| jebronie wrote:
| its way better than the github thing in my experience it produces
| usable PRs
| 0x457 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Used it didn't like it. Claude Code is far better because the
| active collaboration part.
| r0fl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How long is the queue for invites to Kiro these days? I
| joined the wait-list right after it launched.
| jjani wrote:
| Seemingly infinite, I don't think they've invited anyone
| from the list so far.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Do you need an invitation? I'm just using my Amazon Q Dev
| account that I pay $20 a month for. Works fine with Kiro.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| with something like github copilot coding agent it's really
| not, the environment setup is just like github actions
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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
| xiphias2 wrote:
| 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.
| jondwillis wrote:
| 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.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Mainly thinking about what are the minimum testable changes
| that I can give to codex to work on the background.
|
| Tapping the prompts in is the easy part, but async model is
| different to work with, I feel more like a manager, not a
| co-developer.
| vb-8448 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| agentastic wrote:
| Codex/Jules are taking a very different approach than
| CC/Curser,
|
| There used to be this thesis in software of [Cathedral vs Bazaa
| r](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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Cursor now has "Background Agents" which do the same thing as
| Codex/Jules.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how Codex vs. CC maps onto this
| cathedral vs. bazaar dichotomy? They seem fairly similar to
| me.
| agentastic wrote:
| of course,
|
| cathedral = sandbox env in the provider's cloud, so
| [codex](https://chatgpt.com/codex) uses this model. Their
| codex-cli product is the Bazaar model, where you run in
| your computer, in your own environment.
|
| Claude Code, on the other hand, doesn't have the cloud-
| based sandboxing product, you have to run in on your
| computer, so the bazaar model. You can also run in in a way
| that anthropic never envisioned (e.g. give it control to
| your house). Curser also follows the same model, albeit
| they have been trying to get into the cathedral model by
| using the background agent (as someone also pointed out
| below). Presumably not to lose the market share to
| codex/jules/etc.
| stillsut wrote:
| 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...
| pjm331 wrote:
| 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
| natch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It should be illegal to say "> Highest task limits" or change
| them retroactively like Claude or Cursor did
| unreal6 wrote:
| In the middle of a billing cycle (which could be a month or
| year, in some cases), I would agree
| jondwillis wrote:
| >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?
| byefruit wrote:
| 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.
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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)
| esafak wrote:
| Being hosted, it does not have access to your development
| environment. Its Ubuntu sandbox is quite restricted.
| https://jules.google/docs/environment/
| 0x457 wrote:
| 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.
| SchizoDuckie wrote:
| Who in their right mind hands off tasks to one of these for their
| day job? They can never be trusted.
| ActionHank wrote:
| 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.
| SchizoDuckie wrote:
| Great. So Junior devs will be useless now. Now how are we
| going to train more senior devs that know what they're doing?
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| I really appreciate your optimism about a future world
| where you expect senior devs will be needed. How do we get
| the tech bros to share your vision for the future?
| SchizoDuckie wrote:
| As it stands right now, until there is some radically new
| way that doesn't hallucinate implementations, is grounded
| in security rules and actually understands what it's
| doing in the larger context of the system it's working in
| I am not really worried about my job.
|
| I stopped worrying about what techbro's think a long time
| ago. I saw one slinging a blockchain ai nft filesystem
| that will ingest and organize your documents for you on
| twitter yesterday.
| ianandrich wrote:
| Thats the neat part. We won't.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| No need. In a year, senior devs will be useless as well.
| </sarcasm>
| brap wrote:
| I'm sorry but how is that any of your business?
|
| If a company prefers small teams right now, at the cost of
| not having juniors to grow into seniors in the future, they
| are well within their rights to make that decision.
|
| Might be an awful decision, might be a smart one, in any
| case there is no "we" here.
| SchizoDuckie wrote:
| How is that any of my business? Well, I'm a software dev
| by trade and hobby, and I hack the planet on the side and
| advise multibillion $$$ companies on the security
| mistakes they make.
|
| Even for the next 5 years I'd like to be able to have
| some capable humans in my teams.
| brap wrote:
| Then hire juniors for your own team? How is this an
| issue?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > I'm sorry but how is that any of your business?
|
| Part of living in a society is considering the social
| impact of things. Such as the erosion of training
| opportunities for young talent.
|
| Each business can make their own decisions, but someone
| should be thinking about the greater good. "Within your
| rights" doesn't mean it's a good thing, nor should that
| be the sole standard we set for members of our society.
| Same reason people hire interns and write technical
| blogs, open source code and sponsor school hackathons.
| Sometimes the greater good should be a consideration.
| brap wrote:
| >Same reason people hire interns and write technical
| blogs
|
| I'm sorry but almost nobody does this for the greater
| good
| seunosewa wrote:
| They will train themselves by doing open source projects
| with AI.
| esafak wrote:
| You have to review their work, the same as any human's. What's
| the matter, you don't like cheap assistants?
| percentcer wrote:
| Assistants can be taught
| esafak wrote:
| And these models get upgraded -- at a much faster averaged
| rate than humans. Continual vs punctuated improvement :)
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| lbrito wrote:
| I feel exactly this but I'm in my mid 30s. You're lucky in
| the sense that you probably have a longer career and may be
| able to retire.
| munificent wrote:
| I'm definitely not at retirement age yet, but I do have
| to admit that I'm hopeful I can make it to retirement
| while still mostly working in a way that I enjoy.
|
| At the same time, I've realized that "let me just try to
| squeeze out the last of my career" is a really unhealthy
| mindset for me to hold. It sort of locks me into a
| feeling like my best days are behind me or something.
|
| So I am trying to dabble in using AI for coding and
| trying to make sure I stay open-minded and open to
| learning new things. I don't want to feel like a
| dinosaur.
| freshtake wrote:
| I've used all of the popular coding agents, including
| Jules. The reality to me is that they can and should be
| used for certain kinds of low severity and low complexity
| tasks (documentation, writing tests, etc.). They should
| not be used for the opposite end of the spectrum.
|
| There are many perspectives on coding agents because
| there are many different types of engineers, with
| different levels of experience.
|
| In my interactions I've found that junior engineers
| overestimate or overuse the capabilities of these agents,
| while more senior engineers are better calibrated.
|
| The biggest challenge I see is what to do in 5 years once
| a generation of fresh engineers never learned how
| compilers, operating systems, hardware, memory, etc
| actually work. Innovation almost always requires deep
| understanding of the fundamentals, and AI may erode our
| interest in learning these critical bits of knowledge.
|
| What I see as a hiring manager is senior (perhaps older)
| engineers commanding higher comp, while junior engineers
| become increasingly less in demand.
|
| Agents are here to stay, but I'd estimate your best
| engineering days are still ahead.
| esafak wrote:
| You could consider yourself liberated to concentrate on
| higher level concerns like architecture and API/product
| design.
| dingnuts wrote:
| oh come on, I got into this field because I like to code.
|
| now I'm liberated to do all the crap I don't like and
| never code. fuck off
| keeda wrote:
| You're missing a third option, which is actually closer to
| the role of managing coding agents: being a "senior
| engineer / architect / what-have-you". IME the more senior
| engineering roles (staff, principal, fellow, etc) in most
| companies, especially Big Tech companies, involves
| coordinating large projects across multiple teams of
| engineers. It is essentially a necessity to achieve the
| scale of impact required at those levels.
|
| At that level, you almost never get to be hands-on with
| code; the closest you get is code reviews. Instead you
| "deliver value" through identifying large-scale
| opportunities, proposing projects for them, writing design
| and architecture docs, and conducting "alignment meetings"
| where you convince peers and other teams to build the parts
| needed to achieve your vision. The actual coding grunt work
| is done by a bunch of other, typically more junior
| engineers.
|
| That is also the role that often gets derided as
| "architecture astronauts." But it is still an extremely
| technical role! You need to understand all the high-level
| quirks of the underlying systems (and their owners!) to
| ensure they can deliver what you envision. But your primary
| skills become communication and people skills. When I was
| in that role, I liked to joke that my favorite IDEs are
| "IntelliJ, Google Docs, and other engineers."
|
| You'll note that is a very different role from management,
| where your primary responsibilities are more people-
| management and owning increasingly large divisions of the
| business. As a senior engineer you're still a leaf node in
| the org-chart, but as a manager you have a sub-tree that
| you are trying to grow. That is where org-chart climbing
| (and uncharitably, "empire-building") become the primary
| skillset.
|
| As such, the current Coding Agent paradigm seems very well-
| suited for senior engineers. A lot of the skillsets are the
| same, only instead of having to persuade other teams you
| just write a deisgn doc and fire off a bunch of agents,
| review their work, and if you don't like their outputs, you
| can try again or drop down to manual coding.
|
| Currently, I'm still at the "pair-program with AI" stage,
| but I think I'll enjoy having agents. These days I find
| that coding is just a means to an end that is personally
| more satisfying: solving problems.
| nerdix wrote:
| There are 3 kinds of developers.
|
| 1. Those that are motivated by "building things". The
| actual programming is just a means to an end.
|
| 2. Those that are motivated by the salary alone and either
| hate the work or are indifferent to it.
|
| 3. Those that are motivated by the art of programming
| itself. Hands on keyboard, thinking through a problem and
| solving it with code.
|
| Developers that fall into category 1 and 2 love AI. Its
| basically a dream come true for them ("I knocked out 3
| sides projects in a month" for #1 and "You're telling me
| that all I have to do is supervise the AI and I still get
| paid?" for #2).
|
| Its basically a living nightmare for developers in category
| 3.
|
| I've noticed that founders seem to be way higher on AI than
| non-founders. I think a lot of founders fit into category
| 1.
| SchizoDuckie wrote:
| I can trust humans to do as I ask.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Have you met humans? I can't trust myself with half of the
| things I do.
|
| Not saying that I trust LLMs more...
| vb-8448 wrote:
| They will produce PR(and probably shitty code) on a rate you
| are not able to review XD
| esafak wrote:
| And it often does! When I don't like its work I provide
| stricter instructions and repeat if I think it will
| succeed.
|
| I still end up ahead.
| lbrito wrote:
| There will likely be another agent to review the PRs and
| make questionable choices :D
| vb-8448 wrote:
| And token will burn and provider will bill XD
| 9dev wrote:
| And all that with an energy requirement a lot higher than
| a single human just doing it right in the first place,
| and learning something in the process. It all seems so
| incredibly weird and futile to me.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| i do. ALL. THE. TIME.
| 42lux wrote:
| The naming is pathetic.
| esafak wrote:
| Jules the octopus!
| Retr0id wrote:
| > over 140,000 code improvements shared publicly.
|
| Where can I check them out?
| esafak wrote:
| 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
| lacoolj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My problem with Codex is it can't really run Docker. Can Jules or
| any other competitor?
| achierius wrote:
| Claude Code can.
| 0x457 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| > 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"
| turblety wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Watch YouTube while AI is coding for you.
| weakwire wrote:
| That's actually great!
| gman83 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| absurddoctor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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."
| kyleee wrote:
| Nobody is getting a promotion for fixing that shit
| jacksnipe wrote:
| 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
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| The cynic in me thinks that complicated subscriptions schemes
| are an effective way to make people overpay for stuff.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| How long do we think it will take for google to rename this like
| the did from Bard > Gemini
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| 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.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well, first Jules came before Gemini CLI. Second, that's
| okay, as long as it can verify its work (i.e. run tests) it
| will eventually figure out what to do.
|
| Its sandbox is very limited and prevents proper grounding
| IMO. However, if their sandbox works for your project, it
| will be alright.
| ramoz wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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?
| jondwillis wrote:
| 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.
| ramoz wrote:
| for you or anyone else that wants this to be real - I would
| love to test a solution out with you.
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| 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.
| ramoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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....
| pjm331 wrote:
| 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
| ramoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| lacoolj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| timdumol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| > 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"
| timdumol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jmtulloss wrote:
| Both from the design scheme and the process it uses to go about
| its business, Jules seems very inspired by replit
| simonpure wrote:
| There's now also Gemini CLI GitHub Actions for a similar async
| experience -
|
| https://github.com/google-github-actions/run-gemini-cli
| varispeed wrote:
| They could call is Deidre. Missed opportunity.
| simonw wrote:
| 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-...
| computer23 wrote:
| Waiting for Google to buy the rights to Ask Jeeves.
| rcakebread wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Somehow I missed this news from May!
| connectsnk wrote:
| I am confused. Is this a claude code competitor?
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