Google has quietly moved its experimental coding agent Jules out of private preview and into a global beta, giving any developer with a Google account the chance to let an AI file pull requests on their behalf. The product, first teased alongside Gemini 2.0 last December, now runs on Gemini 2.5 Pro and ships with a generous starter tier of five free tasks per day, making it Google’s most direct challenge yet to GitHub Copilot’s new “coding agent” and OpenAI’s Codex.
What Jules actually does
Unlike traditional autocomplete tools, Jules spins up a disposable Cloud VM, clones the target repository, and produces a multi-step plan before touching any files. The agent can bump dependencies, refactor code, add documentation, write tests, or tackle an open issue; every change is surfaced as a standard GitHub pull request for human review.
BREAKING 🚨: Google is rolling out Jules in beta globally. It is a Codex competitor that can make PRs on its own. Comes with 5 free tasks a day. https://t.co/0NE5adiIx4 pic.twitter.com/cl9VcF9FdQ
— TestingCatalog News 🗞 (@testingcatalog) May 19, 2025
Under the hood
Google says Jules “understands your codebase” because it runs the latest multimodal Gemini model, allowing it to reason over large file graphs and project history while following repo-specific contribution guidelines.
Global beta and pricing
The new beta drops the wait-list: anyone can authenticate at jules.google, with a GitHub account and start assigning tasks directly from an issue using the forthcoming assign-to-jules label. Google is seeding adoption with a free quota of five tasks per calendar day; additional usage and enterprise controls are expected to land “later this year.”
How it stacks up against Copilot & Codex
Microsoft revealed its own background coding agent inside GitHub Copilot at Build today, highlighting similar bug-fix and feature-implementation workflows. Jules, as well, bakes the entire loop, planning, diff generation, PR creation - into a single tool, potentially reducing glue code for teams already on Google Cloud.
Availability & upcoming AMA
Jules is now listed on the Google Labs experiments page and its standalone marketing site; developers can sign in immediately or just watch during an AMA scheduled for 21 May 2025 at 22:30 UTC on the Labs Discord server.
Early take
Google’s move signals a broader pivot from code-completion to full agentic development. If the generous free tier and tight GitHub integration hold up under load, Jules could become the default entry point for teams already experimenting with Gemini APIs. The open question is how well the agent scales beyond Python and JavaScript and whether Google can match GitHub’s repository-level context depth. For now, developers get a low-risk way to let an AI “file the PR” and see if it sticks.
