Google Enhances AI Assistant Jules for Software Teams
Google Labs is enhancing its AI programming assistant, Jules, with practical features to boost its usefulness for software teams. The updates include a file selector for targeted context, memory for user preferences, and structured management of environment variables.
The expansion of Jules comes in response to developer demands for more control and stability. Google Labs is now positioning Jules as a concrete tool for software teams, moving beyond its experimental stage.
Jules Tools, a command-line interface, enables developers to work with the AI directly in their terminal. An API allows Jules to be integrated into existing systems and workflows, such as responding to bugs in Slack or stuck builds in CI/CD pipelines. Google is also positioning Jules as an autonomous, asynchronous AI coding agent that executes scoped coding tasks securely in a cloud VM, integrates deeply with GitHub workflows by creating branches and pull requests for developer review, and now offers new command-line tools and a public API for seamless integration into developer environments, aiming to reduce context switching and complement existing tools like Gemini CLI for more iterative tasks.
Google has been working on improving Jules' reliability, lowering latency, and resolving issues with environment settings and file management. Jules integrates with GitHub and can clone repositories to perform independent operations on the code. It can work asynchronously, allowing developers to set tasks and retrieve results later without continuous interaction. With these updates, Google is positioning Jules as a broader addition to existing AI tools that typically work synchronously.
