> 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.
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.
> 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
In other words it is not the writing that is harmful, but the lack of teaching.
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?
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).
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.
> 2 concurrent tasks
> 5 total tasks per day
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!
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When it gets priced, it's usually cheaper (for the same capability)
Why would I ever want this over cursor? The sync thing is kinda cool but I basically already do this with cursor
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
proceeds to list ALL coding tasks.
breakingwalls•5h ago
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-github-copilot-codi...
candiddevmike•5h ago
breakingwalls•3h ago
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caleblloyd•1h ago