Google's Jules enters developers' toolchains as AI coding agent competition heats up | TechCrunch

Google is significantly deepening the integration of its AI coding agent, Jules, into developer workflows by launching Jules Tools, a dedicated command-line interface, and making its API publicly available, allowing it to plug into terminals, CI/CD systems, and tools like Slack. This move aims to reduce context switching for developers, as Jules can now be operated directly within their environment for scoped coding tasks, contrasting with the more collaborative Gemini CLI, which also uses the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. Jules is designed to be less interactive than Gemini CLI, executing tasks independently after plan approval, and the public API allows for extensions into existing workflows and IDEs like VS Code. Recent updates also included adding 'memory' for Jules to retain user preferences and corrections, alongside features like pull request comment handling. A key area of future development involves reducing Jules' dependency on GitHub by enabling integration with other version control systems or environments where code hosting is not a factor. Oversight remains a focus, with Jules designed to pause and prompt the user when stuck, though improving native mobile notifications is a current challenge as many users access the tool via mobile web.