[HN Gopher] Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announc...
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Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API
Author : watkajtys
Score : 208 points
Date : 2025-10-03 19:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jules.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (jules.google)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Url with the anchor in case it moves:
| https://jules.google/docs/changelog/#introducing-the-jules-a...
| yoavm wrote:
| I have an old Django site I'm maintaining for a long-time
| customer of mine. They often want to make small changes - things
| that are only a few lines of code, but would take an hour to just
| spin up the system, remind myself how it works, commit, push,
| update the server and all that.
|
| Last week I've moved the whole infrastructure to Railway, and
| taught the customer to use Jules. They make their own PRs now,
| and Railway spins up an environment with the changes, so the
| customer can check it themselves. It works like 75% of the time,
| and when it doesn't, the customer see that it doesn't before it
| even reaches me. Only if they're happy with the changes, I step
| in to review the code and press merge. It's been a such a huge
| time saver so far.
| derektank wrote:
| How expensive are the API charges? Seems like it might be a bit
| too easy for a customer to rack up a big bill testing out minor
| changes if things weren't configured correctly.
| tecoholic wrote:
| There is a free plan with 15 tasks/sessions. It doesn't count
| tokens AFAIK. There would obviously be a runtime limit of
| some sorts for sure. But it's not the same as API keys and
| token situation
| versteegen wrote:
| The free tier is 15 tasks per day (of gemini-2.5-pro) which
| is EXTREMELY generous. I've had plenty of tasks run for 1-2
| hours. I do think that after 1 or 2 hours it's told it
| needs to wrap up and just present what it's done; I
| couldn't get it to keep going longer than 2 hours. But
| Jules is very slow as it seems to be batch processing on
| spare capacity, so 15+ hours a day is not quite as absurd
| as it sounds.
|
| I haven't tried Jules in a couple weeks, but the UI/UX had
| a lot of issues such as not being given any progress
| updates for very long times. The worst thing was not being
| able to see what it was doing and correct it: you only see
| the state of files (without a usable diff viewer, WTF) at
| the last point that the agent decided to show you anything
| (the last time it completed a todo list item I think, and I
| couldn't get it to update the state when asked, though it
| will send a PR if you ask), and gemini-2.5-pro can often
| try really stupid things as it tries to debug. I've also
| been impressed at its debugging abilities a number of
| times.
|
| Still, I found Jules far more usable than Gemini CLI (free
| tier), where Gemini just constantly stops for no reason and
| needs to be told to continue, and I exhausted the usage
| limit in minutes.
|
| Aside from the unlimited free tier, probably the best part
| of Jules are its automated code reviews. Once, I was
| writing up some extensive comments on its code and then
| unexpectedly a code review was dropped in the conversation
| which gave _exactly_ the same feedback I was writing.
| Unfortunately if it never reaches the point of submitting
| for review, it doesn 't get an automated review. It does
| often ask for feedback before it's done, which is nice. So
| probably I needed to prompt better.
| nl wrote:
| > I've had plenty of tasks run for 1-2 hours.
|
| I think they throttle it - they note it is an
| asynchronous service
|
| I agree that is is generally a pretty useful service.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| I wonder if on Google's end it's basically a low-priority
| job that runs whenever a region has idle GPUs.
| yoavm wrote:
| Literally free. No API - the reason I went for Jules instead
| of Claude Code / Gemini CLI for example is specifically
| because of it's relatively polished web-interface, which I
| assumed that my customer would appreciate. They're using
| their own Google account and the daily tasks free limit seem
| to be more than enough for them.
| f311a wrote:
| I hope they don't store any user data in their app. Trusting
| LLMs blindly is a bad idea.
| Centigonal wrote:
| There is a human being (GP) reviewing the proposed code
| before merging. I wouldn't describe that as trusting the LLM
| blindly.
| f311a wrote:
| No, there is not
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, there is. From the OP:
|
| "Only if they're happy with the changes, I step in to
| review the code and press merge."
| f311a wrote:
| Ok, thanks, I misunderstood that.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| So presumably it spins up a review app from the PR for
| the customer to review, really smart actually.
| yoavm wrote:
| Jules has access to the codebase, not the database. It
| doesn't see any user data.
| cinntaile wrote:
| This is the original poster, you downvoters. I think we can
| assume he knows what he gave access to.
| f311a wrote:
| I was talking about potential security problems introduced
| in the code by LLMs.
|
| It's pretty easy to introduce something like IDOR when
| asking LLMs to write the code.
| yoavm wrote:
| I review the PRs Jules makes just like I review any PR.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Do they still pay you the same amount?
| michaelt wrote:
| I can't speak for the OP, but I have customers I still
| support, because they supported me many years ago when I was
| a teenager taking my first steps into industry.
|
| Does it make me money? Barely a cent. But I can spare a hour
| or two a year for the guy who gave me a leg up and trusted a
| teenager who probably shouldn't have been trusted. And I like
| the feeling of having something I worked on still going
| strong 20+ years later, when so much of my later work has
| been thrown away by the endless corporate rewrite treadmill.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I think that he meant in the sense that now AI it's making
| all the changes
| bavell wrote:
| Same situation, 10+ yrs deep with my first client, project
| still chugging along while I tackle bigger fish.
|
| Can't justify spending much time on it now but a DIY no/low
| code solution for them isn't a bad idea.
| yoavm wrote:
| They've always paid me per hour. The fewer hours, the better
| for me: just like the sibling post, I'm also not in it for
| the money. I care for both the customer and the project, and
| I'm happy that we've found a way to get the development going
| again with really minimal effort from my side.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| That's honestly incredibly cool, could I perhaps encourage you
| to write a blog about the details with some examples on what
| the PR requests from your customer looks like.
| yoavm wrote:
| That's an interesting idea! It's been just a little bit over
| a week now that we're doing it, but maybe by the end of the
| month I'll have some more conclusions to share.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| How do you handle the customer database? Do you push this in
| its entirety to the VM?
| yoavm wrote:
| No, Jules was able to usually edit the code blind and get
| things working. If they didn't, the customer saw it on the
| automatic environment created for the PR, told Jules and
| Jules fixed it. I think I saw one task or maybe two in which
| Jules actually ran the HTTP server, set up Postgres, ran all
| the migrations and created a superuser, only to then write
| some Playwright code that it used to login and take some
| screenshots.
|
| In other words, so far it didn't feel like including a
| database will provide us with much, but I am playing with the
| idea of creating a tiny mock database and including it in the
| repo, as the real database is around 15GB and contains
| passwords and names.
| verdverm wrote:
| Do people trust these kinds of things to effectively work async
| and unsupervised?
|
| My experience with coding agents leads me to believe using
| something like this will end up being more noise and work than
| ROI
|
| I suppose it could be effectively the same loop I use in VS Code,
| but then why would I want an external tool over an integration?
| hackernewds wrote:
| VS Code is not a coding agent as much as it is code generation
| and completion
| verdverm wrote:
| Copilot in Agent mode, thought that would not need to be said
| given the audience and surrounding context
| onion2k wrote:
| _My experience with coding agents leads me to believe using
| something like this will end up being more noise and work than
| ROI_
|
| I think that depends on how far out your horizon is. If you're
| only looking one task out, or maybe a few weeks out, then it's
| not worth investing the time yet. On the other hand, if you're
| looking at how your engineering team will work in 3 years time
| it's definitely worth starting to look at it now.
|
| An example that comes to mind: having a bot that automatically
| spins up an environment when a library is updated, runs through
| the tests, _and identifies why a codebase doesn 't work with
| the update, and fixes it_ then opens an appropriate PR that
| passes all the tests for humans to review would be incredibly
| useful.
| breckenedge wrote:
| The LLMs are a crapshoot, and probably always will be, for
| reliable automatic fixing of anything. They save me time 50%
| of the time. The other 50% they just can't put enough
| together to grok what the existing code does, but damn if
| their code doesn't look like it should work.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Why?
|
| In 3 years time this won't be how these tools work. So it
| feels like you're saying we should invest time in something
| that doesn't work and will be redundant in 6 months.
|
| Worse, your example is one that AI agents are notoriously bad
| at. Give them an error like that and they're more liable to
| break the existing functionality to fix it, after littering
| the code with tons of log statements.
|
| When most of the time the actual fix is a silly little
| mistake that takes one line to fix.
| block_dagger wrote:
| And in five years time all human engineers will be
| replaced. Why not just quit now?
| danielbln wrote:
| Especially odd for someone working in IT. If I'd only
| learn what doesn't change in a few years I'd have to find
| new work.
| verdverm wrote:
| We are unlikely to see these things progress beyond "a never
| learning junior that doesn't remember what it did last hour"
|
| It's a limitation inherited from how they are designed. Fine
| if you babysit them, but they quickly get off the rails and
| waste my time too. Hence to original question about people
| actually using something like Jules versus speculating how
| nice it would be
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah, in my experience you have to babysit them
| latentsea wrote:
| The benefit I've found of external vs integration at least with
| GitHub copilot is in the cloud it auto approves by default and
| it's working in a sandboxed environment.
| verdverm wrote:
| Yea, I get that, it is a bit more work to add the auto
| approve config and setup agents to run in containers yourself
| bradly wrote:
| > why would I want an external tool over an integration?
|
| I do not feel comfortable running agents the same computer I
| have my photos, email, browser cookies, etc. on my personal
| computer, so giving Jules access to my GitHub project was a
| nice experience for me. It was able read my Gemfile and run my
| Rails app's test suite without me having to worry about all my
| private data on my machine. The code wasn't great, but it did
| help with coders block to kick off some features.
| smartties wrote:
| I really hope Google discontinues this project soon (that's kind
| of their specialty). I find it frustrating when chatbots/LLMs
| adopt real names as their brand identities.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| It's a shame Google picked the wrong system design for Jules.
| Claude Code's system design is clearly superior at this point.
|
| Jules is going to simply be another vendor locked walled garden
| play.
| ctoth wrote:
| I've been using AI coding agents since the very early days of
| Aider and I think this is not quite true. There's a place for
| async agents. There's a place for collaborative agents.
| Collaborative agents may even soon be delegating off to
| multiple async agents and picking best results. There's so much
| complexity here and we haven't even begun to explore a corner
| of the possible design space. We're still trying to plug AIs
| into human-shaped holes instead of building around their
| interesting/weird capabilities.
| j_bum wrote:
| Would you be willing to point me to a primer of how I can get
| started with building agents?
|
| This week I experimented with building a simple
| planner/reviewer "agentic" iterative pipeline to automate an
| analysis workflow.
|
| It was effectively me dipping my toes into this field, and I
| am _so_ floored to learn more. But I'm unsure of where to
| start, since everything seems so fast paced.
|
| I'm also unsure of how to experiment, since APIs rack up fees
| pretty quickly. Maybe local models?
| ctoth wrote:
| You can directly use Claude Code via its scriptable API
| (things like --verbose --output-format json --input-format
| json --include-partial-messages
|
| and then use your existing Anthropic plan. Otherwise yeah
| you'll have to start using API tokens:
|
| https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-agents-
| with-t...
| apwell23 wrote:
| or you can pretend to be claude code in api calls
| scottyeager wrote:
| Personally I found the mini SWE-agent to be a very
| approachable introduction to building agents:
| https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent
|
| There are a number of free and cheap LLM options to
| experiment with. Google offers a decent free plan for
| Gemini (get some extra Google accounts). Groq has a free
| tier including some good open weight models. There's also
| free endpoints on OpenRouter that are limited but might be
| useful for long running background agents. DeepSeek v3.2,
| Qwen3, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.6 are all good choices for cheap
| and capable models.
|
| Local models are generally not a shortcut to cheap and
| effective AI. It's a fun thing to explore though.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think they are doing both (in true Google fashion), there is
| an open source Gemini cli with a generous free tier that more
| directly competes with Claude code. https://github.com/google-
| gemini/gemini-cli
|
| It was pretty rough at launch but has gotten a lot better. So
| has Claude code though, so I've never really switched over.
| artdigital wrote:
| I fail to see how comparing Jules to Claude Code is relevant.
| They're completely different.
|
| A good Jules comparison would be OpenAI Codex.
|
| For a Claude Code Google equivalent there's Gemini Code Assist
| CLI
| tecoholic wrote:
| Exactly. As the sibling comments point out. Async and
| collaborative are different ways to work. Both have its
| place.
| langitbiru wrote:
| Tbf, you can install Claude Code to GitHub. Then you can
| mention @claude and ask it to do things.
|
| But Jules is more sophisticated though.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| You mean giving an agent access to your user space and hoping
| nothing goes wrong?
|
| The default installation for claude code is hilariously
| insecure and the only times I've used it is in a fully
| sandboxed VM.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Jules reminds me more of https://github.com/features/spark if
| comparing things
| helsinki wrote:
| Would anyone at Google be willing to tell me how many people are
| working on this project? I've been building something
| functionally similar for my employer, but it's a nights and
| weekends project with only one contributor (me).
| mattmanser wrote:
| Why would you build something for your employer in your
| personal time?
|
| You're literally putting your own money in the shareholders
| pockets.
| umaar wrote:
| Was able to build a personal MCP server that connects to the
| Jules API, letting me dispatch tasks to Jules, from Copilot Chat
| in VS Code.
|
| Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIjz9w77h1Q
| jacooper wrote:
| If you have copilot already, just use the copilot coding agent
| it does the same and it's much better.
|
| From my experience Jules is the worst coding agent on the
| market.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Jules can add all it wants and I will still not use it simply
| because it's a Google product and Google doesn't know how to make
| products in the past 20 years.
|
| Also, why the heck are Google's offerings so fragmented?! We have
| `gemini`, `jules`, and we also have two sets of different Gemini
| APIs (one is more limited than the other), and no API is entirely
| OpenAI-compatible.
|
| Come on Google...
| magundu wrote:
| Is there any price comparison between Jules and Claude code?
|
| Recently I moved from repl.it to Claude max to save costs.
| odie5533 wrote:
| Isn't replit more for vibe coding and Cluade Code for actual
| coding? They seem like very separate products.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| I am so sick of these anthropomorphized names that have nothing
| to do with anything that we're all supposed to remember now. Why
| are we giving products first names? The worst offender is
| probably Amazon Rufus. It's all so dumb and I hate it. At least
| attempt to be clever and name it something that relates to the
| product itself. Even Google Wave, despite its shortcomings, made
| sense as a product name.
| gjvc wrote:
| Claude is named after Claude Shannon. And Google Wave was the
| future we needed, even if we did not deserve it.
| lupusreal wrote:
| My friend, letting yourself be bothered by this is just pissing
| into the wind. Humans have been anthropomorphizing machines and
| other objects for as long as we've been making them, it's a
| fundamental aspect of human nature. Thousands upon thousands of
| ships and trains given human names. Tanks, guns, cars, anything
| that is at least moderately complex or that people find
| themselves relying on and forming relationships with. AIs have
| been getting human names since at least 1966 with Eliza,
| probably earlier, and certainly with many earlier examples in
| fiction.
|
| There's no stopping it. Just roll with it.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| I assumed the Jules name was at least partially inspired by
| Jenkins.
| leoh wrote:
| I always thought of the character from Euphoria
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > Support for workspace users is coming later in October!
|
| I'll never understand why paying users are so often left behind.
| It's truly bizarre.
| boarush wrote:
| I believe it is to make sure that the product remains compliant
| with the data guarantees that Workspace provides. You aren't
| paying for the latest and the greatest features, you're paying
| for the support and compliance guarantees your business
| expects.
| notatoad wrote:
| because paying users don't want features quickly.
|
| companies want features gated behind controls, they want audit
| trails, compliance, SLAs, integration with their admin
| consoles. and they want some certainty that the feature won't
| change too quickly.
|
| i will never understand why people keep using workspace
| accounts for personal use, and then being surprised when
| features hit those accounts more slowly. this is how it's
| worked for 20 years, it's not going to change. if you want
| earlier access, create a gmail account for your personal use.
| Despacito2019 wrote:
| can we go back to have rust/go based binary instead of nodejs
| cli? i really find them annoying to install compared to a single
| binary
| touristtam wrote:
| I find it more annoying that Discord is their preferred way to
| provide feedback.... This shit is banned from work.
| jojohohanon wrote:
| Exposing my ignorance, how is this very different from copilot or
| other online coding agents?
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