Jules, Remote Coding Agent From Google Labs, Announces API

3 months ago

5 replies

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

3 months ago

2 replies

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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.

3 months ago

1 reply

> 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

3 months ago

I wonder if on Google's end it's basically a low-priority job that runs whenever a region has idle GPUs.

3 months ago

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.

3 months ago

2 replies

I hope they don't store any user data in their app. Trusting LLMs blindly is a bad idea.

Centigonal

3 months ago

1 reply

There is a human being (GP) reviewing the proposed code before merging. I wouldn't describe that as trusting the LLM blindly.

3 months ago

1 reply

No, there is not

simonw

3 months ago

2 replies

Yes, there is. From the OP:

"Only if they're happy with the changes, I step in to review the code and press merge."

lyu07282

3 months ago

So presumably it spins up a review app from the PR for the customer to review, really smart actually.

3 months ago

Ok, thanks, I misunderstood that.

3 months ago

2 replies

Jules has access to the codebase, not the database. It doesn't see any user data.

3 months ago

1 reply

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.

3 months ago

I review the PRs Jules makes just like I review any PR.

cinntaile

3 months ago

This is the original poster, you downvoters. I think we can assume he knows what he gave access to.

bonoboTP

3 months ago

2 replies

Do they still pay you the same amount?

michaelt

3 months ago

2 replies

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.

bavell

3 months ago

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.

kelvinjps10

3 months ago

I think that he meant in the sense that now AI it's making all the changes

3 months ago

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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.

3 months ago

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

3 months ago

1 reply

How do you handle the customer database? Do you push this in its entirety to the VM?

3 months ago

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.

3 months ago

5 replies

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

3 months ago

1 reply

VS Code is not a coding agent as much as it is code generation and completion

3 months ago

Copilot in Agent mode, thought that would not need to be said given the audience and surrounding context

onion2k

3 months ago

3 replies

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.

mattmanser

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

2 replies

And in five years time all human engineers will be replaced. Why not just quit now?

danielbln

3 months ago

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.

mattmanser

3 months ago

You misunderstood, there's no point learning it until it works. Don't bother until it's stable, picking up agentic coding will be trivial, because it has to be trivial to work well.

To get agentic coding working 9 months ago you were massaging context, 6 months ago you'd be hooking up MCP servers, 3 months ago you'd be writing a gazillion .claude files.

But all of that is utterly useless knowledge. That's not a transferrable skill.

Using AI is much more effective if you write the code yourself, using AI as a supercharged Stack Overflow.

A programmer + AI supercharged SO > A programmer + agentic coding

So stop wasting your time learning how to get agentic coding working today, especially as the method keeps changing. There's no point learning the voodoo and rain-dancing of this iteration of today's coding agents. Try them, and until they work, discard them.

breckenedge

3 months ago

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.

3 months ago

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

latentsea

3 months ago

1 reply

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.