Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API • Hacker News Board

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#51

Post by apwell23 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #29

j_bum wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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...

or you can pretend to be claude code in api calls

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#52

Post by bradly » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #4

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?

> 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.

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#53

Post by verdverm » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

hackernewds wrote: post #7

verdverm wrote: post #4

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?

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

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

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#54

Post by verdverm » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 3:27 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #21

verdverm wrote: post #4

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?

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…

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

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#55

Post by odie5533 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC

magundu wrote: post #23

Is there any price comparison between Jules and Claude code? Recently I moved from repl.it to Claude max to save costs.

Isn't replit more for vibe coding and Cluade Code for actual coding? They seem like very separate products.

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#56

Post by lyu07282 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

yoavm wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#57

Post by lyu07282 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #40

f311a wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is not

Yes, there is. From the OP: "Only if they're happy with the changes, I step in to review the code and press merge."

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

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#58

Post by jgalt212 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

yoavm wrote: post #3

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…

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

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#59

Post by neuronexmachina » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #43

versteegen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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

Re: Jules, remote coding agent from Google Labs, announces API

#60

Post by langitbiru » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

artdigital wrote: post #15

MrDarcy wrote: post #11

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.

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

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.