So, you can assign github issues to this thing, and it can handle them, merge the results in, and mark the bug as fixed?
I kind of wonder what would happen if you added a "lead dev" AI that wrote up bugs, assigned them out, and "reviewed" the work. Then you'd add a "boss" AI that made new feature demands of the lead dev AI. Maybe the boss AI could run the program and inspect the experience in some way so it could demand more specific changes. I wonder what would happen if you just let that run for a while. Presumably it'd devolve into some sort of crazed noise, but it'd be interesting to watch. You could package the whole thing up as a startup simulator, and you could watch it like a little ant farm to see how their little note-taking app was coming along.
jacob019 · 6h ago
It's actually a decent patern for agents. I wrote a pricing system with an anylyst agent, a decision agent, and a review agent. They work together to make decisions that comply with policy. It's funny to watch them chatter sometimes, they really play their role, if the decision agent asks the anylyst for policy guidance it refuses and explains that it's role is to analyze. Though they do often catch mistakes that way and the role playing gets good results.
OccamsMirror · 1h ago
My gut says it will go off the rails pretty quickly.
itchyjunk · 5h ago
What about "VC" AI that wants a unicorn? :D
wmf · 5h ago
We have been informed that VC is the only job AI cannot do.
flkenosad · 3h ago
VC-funded corp?
Brajeshwar · 2h ago
I believe I missed the memo that to-do apps[1] got replaced by note-taking apps.
seems like the 1 person unicorn will be a reality soon :-)
sakesun · 2h ago
Similar to how some domain name sellers acquire desirable domains to resell at a higher price, agent providers might exploit your success by hijacking your project once it gains attraction.
bbor · 5h ago
/ :-(
111111101101 · 7h ago
I was interested. Clicked the try button and just another wait list. When will Google learn that the method that worked so well with Gmail doesn't work any more. There are so many shiny toys to play with now, I will have forgotten about this tomorrow.
jwr · 2h ago
And if you don't sign up quickly after your turn in the queue comes up, you might miss the service altogether, because Google will have shut it down already.
miki123211 · 6h ago
The method absolutely does work, but you need loyal advocates who are praising your product to their friends, or preferrably users who are already knocking on your door.
EugeneOZ · 48m ago
They have a name for these people: Google Developer Experts (in reality: "Evangelists").
Google will die by its waitlist and region restrictions.
sagarpatil · 2h ago
I signed up on the waitlist when it was announced, got my invite today.
ldjkfkdsjnv · 7h ago
They had to release something, openai is moving at blazing speed
-__---____-ZXyw · 7h ago
Sounds like a meme. I just can't take the phrase "blazing speed" seriously anymore. Is this intended humorously? Or is it just me
jsemrau · 6h ago
It's success theater. You need to show progress otherwise you might be perceived falling behind. In times where LoI's are written and partnerships are forged the promise has more value than the fact.
archargelod · 3h ago
Anymore? For me it always sounded too childish or sarcastic. I would expect to see "Blazingly Fast" on a box of Hot Wheels or Nerf Blaster, not a serious tech product.
ldjkfkdsjnv · 6h ago
you arent paying attention? google is getting smoked by teams of 25 at openai
thorum · 8h ago
Google’s ability to offer inference for free is a massive competitive advantage vs everyone else:
> Is Jules free of charge?
> Yes, for now, Jules is free of charge. Jules is in beta and available without payment while we learn from usage. In the future, we expect to introduce pricing, but our focus right now is improving the developer experience.
> Google’s ability to offer inference for free is a massive competitive advantage vs everyone else:
Haven't tried Jules myself yet, still playing around with Codex, but personally I don't really care if it's free or not. If it solves my problems better than the others, then I'll use it, otherwise I'll use other things.
I'm sure I'm not alone in focusing on how well it works, rather than what it costs (until a certain point).
jsemrau · 8m ago
Technically speaking,the strategy they execute is called "Loss Leader".
As Loss Leader, the company offers a product at a reduced price to attract users, create stickiness, and through that aims to capture the market.
Well, this isn't the first github-based agent. A well-known one is https://app.all-hands.dev/. And, there are great cheap or even free more general agents. So, given that this agent isn't a novelty, price is naturally an immediate talking point.
nathan_compton · 6h ago
I tried using Codex today and it sucked real bad, so maybe Jules will actually be good?
YetAnotherNick · 8h ago
That's all good and well but its takes time to compare the products. And people are rarely willing to use paid product for comparison.
diggan · 7h ago
> That's all good and well but its takes time to compare the products
Hence many of us are still busy trying out Codex to it's full extent :)
> And people are rarely willing to use paid product for comparison.
Yeah, and I'm usually the same, unless there is some free trial or similar, I'm unlikely to spend money unless I know it's good.
My own calculation changed with the coming of better LLMs though. Even paying 200 EUR/month can be easily regained if you're say a freelance software engineer, so I'm starting to be a lot more flexible in "try for one month" subscriptions.
xiphias2 · 7h ago
I haven't read too much from others, but personally for me Codex online form was the biggest productivity boost in coding since the original Copilot.
Cursor just deleted my unit tests too many times in agent mode.
Codex 5x-ed my output, though the code is worse than I would write it, at this point the productivity improvement with passing tests, not deleting tests is just too good to be ignored anymore.
I just noticed that this is definitely true for me, but not if the product is pay to go.
I have far fewer qualms about spending $10 on credits, even if I decide the product isn't worth it and never actually spend those credits, than about taking a free trial for a $5 subscription.
cheriot · 39m ago
OpenAI lost $5 billion in 2024 and there are claims loses will double in 2025. For now, that's just the cost to play.
Y_Y · 7h ago
I feel like this (and I know it's big tech tradition) had the same economic effect as dumping.
Google has been offering you "free inference" for more than a decade. People who never work there are simply not aware of how thorough soaked in machine inference many Google products are, especially the major ones like web search, mail, photos, etc.
> No. Jules does not train on private repository content. Privacy is a core principle for Jules, and we do not use your private repositories to train models. Learn more about how your data is used to improve Jules.
It's hard to tell what the data collection will be, but it's most likely similar to Gemini where your conversation can become part of the training data. Unclear if that includes context like the repository contents.
I read that a couple of times. It sounds vaguely clever and a bit ominous, but I have no clue what it means. Can you explain?
Google products had had a net positive impact on my life over, what is it, 20 years now. If I had had to pay subscription fees over that span of time, for all the services that I use, that would have been a lot of very real money that I would not have right now.
Is there a next step where it all gets worse? When?
add-sub-mul-div · 8h ago
They're going to make so much money when nobody knows how to code or think anymore without the crutch.
falcor84 · 7h ago
I'll just put this here:
> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
> What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
- Plato quoting Socrates in "Phaedrus", circa 370 BCE
noduerme · 7h ago
But did you memorize that quote, or was it sufficient to know its gist so you could google it?
Avicebron · 7h ago
At least with writing it's fairly easy to implement on your own with little more than what most people would have available in a rudimentary survival situation. It'll be a tough day when someone goes to sign into their GoogleLife (tm) and find out that they can't get AI access because "precluding conditions agreed to upon signing"
falcor84 · 7h ago
As I see it, the solution to this is to invest in open source. As for a "survival situation", a solar-powered laptop with a locally running LLM would definitely be the first item on my list.
No comments yet
falcor84 · 7h ago
Oh definitely the latter. My memory is too far gone from a lifetime of reading. May the next generation avoid my dire fate.
-__---____-ZXyw · 6h ago
But are you filled with wisdom, or with the conceit of wisdom?
brendoelfrendo · 5h ago
Hm, I think Plato is largely true; not in the sense that writing is a harmful crutch, but in the sense that simply being able to read something is not a substitute for knowing it. I think we can see that at play here on HN and on the larger internet all the time: people who read a paper or article, and then attempt to discuss it, without realizing that their understanding of the material is entirely incorrect. These are "men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom," and they lack the awareness to understand that they don't understand.
In other words it is not the writing that is harmful, but the lack of teaching.
threatofrain · 7h ago
This is standard startup play. Have a free beta stage and then transition into pricing.
85392_school · 7h ago
There are some limits:
> 2 concurrent tasks
> 5 total tasks per day
spongebobstoes · 6h ago
5 tasks per day is low enough to be roughly useless for serious work
sigmar · 5h ago
It isn't "5 prompts." A single task is more like a "project" where you can repeatedly extend, re-prompt, and revise.
xianshou · 8h ago
Both Google and Microsoft have sensibly decided to focus on low-level, junior automation first rather than bespoke end-to-end systems. Not exactly breadth over depth, but rather reliability over capability. Several benefits from the agent development perspective:
- Less access required means lower risk of disaster
- Structured tasks mean more data for better RL
- Low stakes mean improvements in task- and process-level reliability, which is a prerequisite for meaningful end-to-end results on senior-level assignments
- Even junior-level tasks require getting interface and integration right, which is also required for a scalable data and training pipeline
Seems like we're finally getting to the deployment stage of agentic coding, which means a blessed relief from the pontification that inevitably results from a visible outline without a concrete product.
breakingwalls · 8h ago
Wow, it looks like Google and Microsoft timed their announcements for the same day, or perhaps one of them rushed their launch because the other company announced sooner than expected. These are exciting times!
Google IO is this week, same as Microsoft Build. Battle of the attention grabbing announcements.
breakingwalls · 6h ago
We have to see what Google has in store, probably better models, AI integrations with Android Studio and may be bring glasses back?
-__---____-ZXyw · 6h ago
Yes, the masses are practically heaving with excitement, indeed
caleblloyd · 5h ago
Both announcements on the heels of OpenAI Codex Research Preview too, which is essentially the same product
_pdp_ · 8h ago
The copy though: "Spend your time doing what you want to do!" followed by images of play video games (I presume), ride a bicycle, read a book, and play table tennis.
I am cool with all of that but it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity.
habosa · 5h ago
So absurd. As if your boss is going to let you go play tennis during the day because Jules is doing your work.
If all of these tools really do make people 20-100% more productive like they say (I doubt it) the value is going to accrue to ownership, not to labor.
disqard · 3h ago
Shhhh... don't tell the plebes what it really means to "2x their productivity".
Seriously though, this kind of tech-assisted work output improvement has happened many times in the past, and by now we should all have been working 4-hour weeks, but we all know how it has actually worked out.
diggan · 8h ago
> it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity
I occasionally code for fun, but usually I don’t. I treat programming as a last-resort tool, something I use only when it’s the best way to achieve my goal. If I can achieve some thing without coding or with coding, I usually opt for the first unless the tradeoffs are really shit.
beatboxrevival · 8h ago
I think they are suggesting that you can focus on the code that you want to write - whatever that is. Especially since the first line is, "Jules does coding tasks you don't want to do." I took the first image as being someone working on the computer. Or, take back your time doing whatever you want - e.g. cycling, table tennis, etc.
spacechild1 · 4h ago
> Or, take back your time doing whatever you want - e.g. cycling, table tennis, etc.
That might be true for hobbyists or side projects, but employees definitely won't get to work less (or earn more). All the financial value of increased productiveness goes to the companies. That's the nature of capitalism.
beatboxrevival · 4h ago
I don't think it's meant to be literal, more tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, developers aren't going to be playing table tennis while they wait for their task to finish. Since it's async, you can do other things. For most developers, that's just going to mean another task.
ryandrake · 7h ago
Yea, as a hobbyist, I like to program. This sales pitch is like trying to sell me a robot that goes bicycle riding for me. Wait a minute... I like to ride my bicycle!
doug_durham · 7h ago
Good to see there are others like me. What do I do when I'm not coding for work? I'm coding for my hobby.
runlevel1 · 7h ago
I find the enjoyment is correlated with my ability to maintain forward momentum.
If you work at a company where there's a byzantine process to do anything, this pitch might speak to you. Especially if leadership is hungry for AI but has little appetite for more meaningful changes.
runeblaze · 5h ago
To be honest I am pretty sure 95% of the people like play games and ride bike more than just coding.
add-sub-mul-div · 8h ago
That's a nuance worth exploring. The world is being optimized for clockwatchers who want to do their work with the least amount of effort. Before long (if not already) people who enjoy their craft, and think of their work as a craft, will be ridiculed for wanting to do it themselves.
anarticle · 6h ago
I think it means craft people will eat their lunch.
ramesh31 · 7h ago
>The world is being optimized for clockwatchers who want to do their work with the least amount of effort. Before long (if not already) people who enjoy their craft, and think of their work as a craft, will be ridiculed for wanting to do it themselves.
There is one clock you should be watching regardless, which is the clock of your life. Your code will not come see you in the hospital, or cheer you up when you're having a rough day. You wont be sitting around at 70 wishing you had spent more 3am nights debugging something. When your back gives out from 18hrs a day of grinding at a desk to get something out, and you can barely walk from the sciatica, you wont be thinking about that great new feature you shipped. There are far more important things in life once you come to terms with that, and you will learn that the whole point of the former is enabling the latter.
bmgxyz · 7h ago
Writing code _has_ helped me feel better on some bad days. Even looking back at old projects brings me contentment and reassurance sometimes. On its own, it can't provide the happiness that a balanced life can, but craft and achievement are definitely pleasing. I would consider it an essential part of a good life, regardless of what the actual activity is.
This is different from meaningless work that brings you nothing except a paycheck, which I agree is important to minimize or eliminate. We should apply machines to this kind of work as much as we can, except in cases where the work itself doesn't need to exist.
esafak · 7h ago
You could say the same about every job, so you are really arguing against jobs in general. Who's going to help you fix your sciatica if your doctor and physical therapist think like that?
insin · 7h ago
The opposite of a clockwatcher isn't a workaholic, it's someone enjoying writing code and the collaboration, problem solving and design process which leads to what you end up writing, and enjoying _doing it well_ inside normal work hours, remarking at how quickly the clock is going when they do check it.
Rodeoclash · 5h ago
Should have had a food delivery rider.
jspdown · 42m ago
> Jules creates a PR of the changes. Approve the PR, merge it to your branch, and publish it on GitHub.
Then, who is testing the change? Even for a dependency update with a good test coverage, I would still test the change.
What takes time when uploading dependencies is not the number of line typed but the time it takes to review the new version and test the output.
I'm worried that agent like that will promote bad practice.
85392_school · 7h ago
> Also, you can get caught up fast. Jules creates an audio summary of the changes.
This is an unusual angle. Of course Google can do this because they have the tech behind NotebookLM, but I'm not sure what the value of telling you how your prompt was implemented is.
manmal · 7h ago
I guess the idea is vibe coding while laying in bed or driving? If my kids are any indication of the generation to come, they sure love audio over reading.
sandspar · 19m ago
In a handful of years you'll have the voice/video generation come of age. Also we may have some new form factor like AI necklaces or glasses or something.
SafeDusk · 3h ago
Glad to see they're joining the game, there is so much work to do here. Have been using Gemini 2.5 pro as an autonomous coding agent for a while because it is free. Their work with AlphaEvolve is also pushing the edge - I did a small write up on AlphaEvolve with agentic workflow here: https://toolkami.com/alphaevolve-toolkami-style/
Xmd5a · 29m ago
How? I constantly hit the limit.
Wowfunhappy · 7h ago
I really want to try out Google's new Gemini 2.5 Pro model that everyone says is so great at coding. However, the fact that Jules runs in cloud-based VMs instead of on my local machine makes it much less useful to me than Claude Code, even if the model was better.
The projects I work on have lots of bespoke build scripts and other stuff that is specific to my machine and environment. Making that work in Google's cloud VM would be a significant undertaking in itself.
dcre · 7h ago
You can use Aider with Gemini. All you need is an API key.
"Spend your time doing what you want to do!" - I enjoy coding cool new code ....
beatboxrevival · 7h ago
I think that's the point AI agents are trying to sell. Spend more time on the type of coding tasks you want to do, like coding cool new code, and not the tasks that you don't want to do.
anshumankmr · 3h ago
This is what Devin was supposed to be, right? Although I have been waitlisted, I am still eager to try it out.
mark_l_watson · 3h ago
I used Jules three times today, very impressive! It also handles coding-adjacent work. Good github integrations.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 3h ago
How does it validate that what it writes works? Does it try to run tests or compile?
rvz · 3h ago
Notice how no-one (up until now) mentioned "Devin" or compared it to any other AI agent?
It appears that AI moves so quickly that it was completely forgotten or little to no-one wanted to pay for its original prices.
Here's the timeline:
1. Devin was $200 - $500.
2. Then Lovable, Bolt, Github Copilot and Replit reduced their AI Agent prices to $20 - $40
3. Devin was then reduced to $20.
4. Then Cursor and Windsurf AI agents started at $18 - $20.
5. Afterwards, we also have Claude Code and OpenAI Codex Agents starting at around $20.
6. Then we have Github Copilot Agents embedded directly into GitHub and VS Code for just $0 - $10.
Now we have Jules from Google which is....$0 (Free)
Just like how Google search is free, the race to zero is going to only accelerate and it was a trap to begin with, that only the large big tech incumbents will be able to reduce prices for a very long time.
barrenko · 27m ago
The price of this is (accurately) below that of a mobile telco subscription. The final effects of this, will be, oh boy.
gizmodo59 · 5h ago
Can’t wait to try this!
Codex and codex cli are the best from what I have tested so far. Codex is really neat as I can do it from ChatGPT app.
mountainriver · 8h ago
Any coding solution that doesn’t offer the ability to edit the code in an IDE is nonsense.
Why would I ever want this over cursor? The sync thing is kinda cool but I basically already do this with cursor
diggan · 7h ago
Heh, personally I'd say any coding solution that lives inside an IDE is nonsense :P Funny how perspectives can be so different. I want something standalone, that I can use in in a pane to the left/right of my already opened nvim instance, or even further away than that. Gave Cursor a try some weeks ago but seems worse than Aider even, and having an entire editor just for some LLM edits/pair programming seems way overkill and unnecessary.
ryandrake · 7h ago
Ideally, it would be built in to [my IDE of choice]. So I neither have to have a separate browser window open, copy/pasting, or have a separate IDE open, copy/pasting. Having it as a standalone tool makes as much sense as having a spell checker that is a separate browser window running a separate app from the word processor you are using to write your letter. Why?
mock-possum · 4h ago
Can you have it make changes, then review them in a gif diff? That’s basically all I do with cursor at this point
CobrastanJorji · 6h ago
Is the "asynchronous" bit important? How long does it take to do its thing?
My normal development workflow of ticket -> assignment -> review -> feedback -> more feedback -> approval -> merging is asynchronous, but it'd be better synchronous. It's only asynchronous because the people I'm assigning the work to don't complete the work in seconds.
ukuina · 5h ago
Other Agentic tools run for 10-30min based on model, task complexity and the number of dead ends the LLM get into.
modeless · 6h ago
Can it resolve merge conflicts for me? My least favorite programming task and one I haven't seen automated yet.
juddlyon · 3h ago
Claude Code has been creating and cleaning up lots of Git messes for me.
mock-possum · 5h ago
I’d love to see it if that’s possible - merge conflict cleanup can be some of the hardest calls, imo, particularly when the ‘right’ merge is actually a hybridized block that contains elements from both theirs and mine. I feel like introducing today’s LLM into the process would only end up making things harder to untangle.
gtirloni · 3h ago
> Jules does coding tasks you don't want to do.
proceeds to list ALL coding tasks.
azhenley · 8h ago
So many agent tools now. What is the special sauce of each?
meta_ai_x · 7h ago
Gemini has 1 Million context window, which usually works better for coding.
When it gets priced, it's usually cheaper (for the same capability)
otabdeveloper4 · 1h ago
The whole "industry" right now is hacked together crap shoved out the door with zero thinking involved.
Wait a year or two, evaluating this stuff at the peak of the hype cycle is pointless.
airstrike · 8h ago
Spoiler alert: there isn't one
meta_ai_x · 7h ago
Context Window and Pricing absolutely matters
dcre · 7h ago
But many "agentic" tools are model-agnostic. The question is about what the tool itself is doing.
t00ny · 6h ago
Am I the only one a bit annoyed that the return statement isn't updated to `return step`?
sneak · 1h ago
It’s really annoying to me (and sad for society) that everything everywhere only supports github for code hosting.
There are a million places to do dev that aren’t Microsoft, but you’d never know it from looking at app launches.
It’s almost like people who don’t use GitHub and Gmail and Instagram are becoming second class citizens on the web.
turnsout · 8h ago
These coding agents are coming out so fast I literally don't have time to compare them to each other. They all look great, but keeping up with this would be its own full time job. Maybe that's the next agent.
justinzollars · 3h ago
Jules was unable to complete the task in time. Please review the work done so far and provide feedback for Jules to continue.
kcatskcolbdi · 8h ago
> Thanks for your interest in Jules. We'll email you when Jules is available.
Well here's to hoping it's better than Cursor. I doubt it considering my experiences with Gemini have been awful, but I'm willing to give it a shot!
kylecazar · 8h ago
Oh, I got an email invitation to try it out this morning... This post reminded me to give it a go. I don't remember asking for an invitation -- not sure how I got on a list.
lofaszvanitt · 7h ago
And the logo is an octopus? Heh, nice connotations. Now I'm gonna trust my data with this for sure :DD.
bionhoward · 7h ago
No privacy documentation? No terms of use? Is this a joke?
Here’s a “reasoning trace:” You want to use Gemini? Why would you if AI Studio is way better? Oh, privacy? Except to get privacy in Gemini, you need to turn off Gemini Apps Activity, which deletes your entire chat history… (forcing you to manually copy paste every input and output into notes).
OpenAI might be a bunch of monopolistic assholes, but at least you can (manually opt out of hidden) training ChatGPT without losing your entire chat history.
Another big reason not to use AI Studio, even though it’s free and way better than the PAID Gemini offering, is you can’t use it for anything that competes with it. It being general intelligence. Meaning this is yet another instance of the “you can’t use our AI for anything” legal term trend. Luckily, they don’t explicitly mention Gemini app in their “Additional API Terms” here:
> You may not use the Services to develop models that compete with the Services (e.g., Gemini API or Google AI Studio).
Then you go and use Google search, and it tries to send you to fucking AI Mode in a different app, can you guys pick a lane ? Am I supposed to use Gemini with no chat history, AI studio for the free better app and get brain raped and sued by a megacorporation, or Google “AI Mode” and get redirected back and forth from my browser a billion times?
And what’s the cost to user experience for switching between three different apps with different rules and maintaining three interfaces?
Which brings me back to Jules. How do we know what’s the privacy policy for Jules? How do we know if we’re “allowed” to use it for AI?
Businesses using this type of thing need to return two booleans confidently: are they training on our private codebase? Are they gonna ban or sue us for breaking the rules?
Linking to the general Google terms and privacy pages doesn’t really inspire much (any) confidence in the privacy aspect, and who knows if Jules counts as Gemini API thing? Are we supposed to just pray it doesn’t count as using the Gemini API even though it probably does? If Google trains on everything then how can we trust them not to do it on our code?
bitpush · 4h ago
It would have taken less time to find the privacy notices than to type this rant up.
I kind of wonder what would happen if you added a "lead dev" AI that wrote up bugs, assigned them out, and "reviewed" the work. Then you'd add a "boss" AI that made new feature demands of the lead dev AI. Maybe the boss AI could run the program and inspect the experience in some way so it could demand more specific changes. I wonder what would happen if you just let that run for a while. Presumably it'd devolve into some sort of crazed noise, but it'd be interesting to watch. You could package the whole thing up as a startup simulator, and you could watch it like a little ant farm to see how their little note-taking app was coming along.
1. https://todomvc.com
https://developers.google.com/community/experts
> Is Jules free of charge?
> Yes, for now, Jules is free of charge. Jules is in beta and available without payment while we learn from usage. In the future, we expect to introduce pricing, but our focus right now is improving the developer experience.
https://jules-documentation.web.app/faq
Haven't tried Jules myself yet, still playing around with Codex, but personally I don't really care if it's free or not. If it solves my problems better than the others, then I'll use it, otherwise I'll use other things.
I'm sure I'm not alone in focusing on how well it works, rather than what it costs (until a certain point).
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp
Hence many of us are still busy trying out Codex to it's full extent :)
> And people are rarely willing to use paid product for comparison.
Yeah, and I'm usually the same, unless there is some free trial or similar, I'm unlikely to spend money unless I know it's good.
My own calculation changed with the coming of better LLMs though. Even paying 200 EUR/month can be easily regained if you're say a freelance software engineer, so I'm starting to be a lot more flexible in "try for one month" subscriptions.
Cursor just deleted my unit tests too many times in agent mode.
Codex 5x-ed my output, though the code is worse than I would write it, at this point the productivity improvement with passing tests, not deleting tests is just too good to be ignored anymore.
I have far fewer qualms about spending $10 on credits, even if I decide the product isn't worth it and never actually spend those credits, than about taking a free trial for a $5 subscription.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dumping.asp
EDIT: legal link doesn't work here (https://jules-documentation.web.app/faq#does-jules-train-on-...)
> No. Jules does not train on private repository content. Privacy is a core principle for Jules, and we do not use your private repositories to train models. Learn more about how your data is used to improve Jules.
It's hard to tell what the data collection will be, but it's most likely similar to Gemini where your conversation can become part of the training data. Unclear if that includes context like the repository contents.
https://jules.google.com/legal
Google products had had a net positive impact on my life over, what is it, 20 years now. If I had had to pay subscription fees over that span of time, for all the services that I use, that would have been a lot of very real money that I would not have right now.
Is there a next step where it all gets worse? When?
> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
> What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
- Plato quoting Socrates in "Phaedrus", circa 370 BCE
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In other words it is not the writing that is harmful, but the lack of teaching.
> 2 concurrent tasks
> 5 total tasks per day
- Less access required means lower risk of disaster
- Structured tasks mean more data for better RL
- Low stakes mean improvements in task- and process-level reliability, which is a prerequisite for meaningful end-to-end results on senior-level assignments
- Even junior-level tasks require getting interface and integration right, which is also required for a scalable data and training pipeline
Seems like we're finally getting to the deployment stage of agentic coding, which means a blessed relief from the pontification that inevitably results from a visible outline without a concrete product.
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-github-copilot-codi...
I am cool with all of that but it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity.
If all of these tools really do make people 20-100% more productive like they say (I doubt it) the value is going to accrue to ownership, not to labor.
Seriously though, this kind of tech-assisted work output improvement has happened many times in the past, and by now we should all have been working 4-hour weeks, but we all know how it has actually worked out.
I occasionally code for fun, but usually I don’t. I treat programming as a last-resort tool, something I use only when it’s the best way to achieve my goal. If I can achieve some thing without coding or with coding, I usually opt for the first unless the tradeoffs are really shit.
That might be true for hobbyists or side projects, but employees definitely won't get to work less (or earn more). All the financial value of increased productiveness goes to the companies. That's the nature of capitalism.
If you work at a company where there's a byzantine process to do anything, this pitch might speak to you. Especially if leadership is hungry for AI but has little appetite for more meaningful changes.
There is one clock you should be watching regardless, which is the clock of your life. Your code will not come see you in the hospital, or cheer you up when you're having a rough day. You wont be sitting around at 70 wishing you had spent more 3am nights debugging something. When your back gives out from 18hrs a day of grinding at a desk to get something out, and you can barely walk from the sciatica, you wont be thinking about that great new feature you shipped. There are far more important things in life once you come to terms with that, and you will learn that the whole point of the former is enabling the latter.
This is different from meaningless work that brings you nothing except a paycheck, which I agree is important to minimize or eliminate. We should apply machines to this kind of work as much as we can, except in cases where the work itself doesn't need to exist.
Then, who is testing the change? Even for a dependency update with a good test coverage, I would still test the change. What takes time when uploading dependencies is not the number of line typed but the time it takes to review the new version and test the output.
I'm worried that agent like that will promote bad practice.
This is an unusual angle. Of course Google can do this because they have the tech behind NotebookLM, but I'm not sure what the value of telling you how your prompt was implemented is.
The projects I work on have lots of bespoke build scripts and other stuff that is specific to my machine and environment. Making that work in Google's cloud VM would be a significant undertaking in itself.
https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
It appears that AI moves so quickly that it was completely forgotten or little to no-one wanted to pay for its original prices.
Here's the timeline:
Now we have Jules from Google which is....$0 (Free)Just like how Google search is free, the race to zero is going to only accelerate and it was a trap to begin with, that only the large big tech incumbents will be able to reduce prices for a very long time.
Codex and codex cli are the best from what I have tested so far. Codex is really neat as I can do it from ChatGPT app.
Why would I ever want this over cursor? The sync thing is kinda cool but I basically already do this with cursor
My normal development workflow of ticket -> assignment -> review -> feedback -> more feedback -> approval -> merging is asynchronous, but it'd be better synchronous. It's only asynchronous because the people I'm assigning the work to don't complete the work in seconds.
proceeds to list ALL coding tasks.
When it gets priced, it's usually cheaper (for the same capability)
Wait a year or two, evaluating this stuff at the peak of the hype cycle is pointless.
There are a million places to do dev that aren’t Microsoft, but you’d never know it from looking at app launches.
It’s almost like people who don’t use GitHub and Gmail and Instagram are becoming second class citizens on the web.
Well here's to hoping it's better than Cursor. I doubt it considering my experiences with Gemini have been awful, but I'm willing to give it a shot!
Here’s a “reasoning trace:” You want to use Gemini? Why would you if AI Studio is way better? Oh, privacy? Except to get privacy in Gemini, you need to turn off Gemini Apps Activity, which deletes your entire chat history… (forcing you to manually copy paste every input and output into notes).
OpenAI might be a bunch of monopolistic assholes, but at least you can (manually opt out of hidden) training ChatGPT without losing your entire chat history.
Another big reason not to use AI Studio, even though it’s free and way better than the PAID Gemini offering, is you can’t use it for anything that competes with it. It being general intelligence. Meaning this is yet another instance of the “you can’t use our AI for anything” legal term trend. Luckily, they don’t explicitly mention Gemini app in their “Additional API Terms” here:
[1] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms
> You may not use the Services to develop models that compete with the Services (e.g., Gemini API or Google AI Studio).
Then you go and use Google search, and it tries to send you to fucking AI Mode in a different app, can you guys pick a lane ? Am I supposed to use Gemini with no chat history, AI studio for the free better app and get brain raped and sued by a megacorporation, or Google “AI Mode” and get redirected back and forth from my browser a billion times?
And what’s the cost to user experience for switching between three different apps with different rules and maintaining three interfaces?
Which brings me back to Jules. How do we know what’s the privacy policy for Jules? How do we know if we’re “allowed” to use it for AI?
Businesses using this type of thing need to return two booleans confidently: are they training on our private codebase? Are they gonna ban or sue us for breaking the rules?
Linking to the general Google terms and privacy pages doesn’t really inspire much (any) confidence in the privacy aspect, and who knows if Jules counts as Gemini API thing? Are we supposed to just pray it doesn’t count as using the Gemini API even though it probably does? If Google trains on everything then how can we trust them not to do it on our code?