In 2008, I was in my first year working as a software engineer after graduating college. My manager at TheLadders asked me if I wanted to go to a conference Google was hosting called Google I/O. Of course, I said yes- it was an opportunity to go to SFO, but more importantly, it was Google. I was excited to learn what new things Google was building and so despite my then-fear of flying, I agreed to go.

The conference was all of the things you’d expect from a tech conference of that time period- there were bean bag chairs and an afterparty featuring arcade games and a performance by Flight of the Conchords. After a couple of days in the Moscone Center, I came back to New York, super pumped about Google Web Toolkit and a billion other technologies that are largely irrelevant besides Android.

Ever since then, I eagerly await Google I/O and WWDC to see what’s new. The announcements have gotten progressively less exciting, but alas, each year I still have hope.

This year unsurprisingly everything at Google I/O was about AI. AI. AI. AI! This included the announcement of a few new tools (that frankly feel like they should be part of a larger comprehensive toolkit and not standalone items, but I digress..) like Whisk, Stitch, and Jules.

Enter Jules

Jules is an async development agent. You give it access to a Github repo and write a task you want it to do; Jules will respond with a plan and assuming you approve the plan, it can make the changes and push them to a branch for you to review. Neat.

Because it’s in beta, users are limited to 5 tasks a day. Even with that, for the first week or two after it was announced, it frequently would just hang, but I did get it to do a couple of things for me.

Last post, I mentioned the Mandarin flashcard app I had created with Claude. I hadn’t created a README so this seemed like a good task to offload to Jules. I wrote the simplest prompt possible and away it went.

Jules wrote a plan for creating a README

The plan seemed reasonable so I approved it and Jules went off to execute it, providing updates as it worked.

After a few minutes, it finished and told me it was ready for review.

I was able to go over to Github and review the branch. The README gave a brief explanation of the project, listed the required software to run it, and gave steps on how to run the project.

While it maybe included some additional info I would’ve left out, overall it did a solid job. I’ve yet to use it for anything meatier, but I plan to try it out on the mandarin-flashcards repo.