New options are now available for Jules, Google's coding Agent - a CLI and an API.

We covered the release of Jules back in August, see Google Jules Coding Assistant Now Available. To cut a long story short, we found that Jules is:

an asynchronous, agentic coding assistant that integrates directly with existing repositories. It clones your codebase into a secure Google Cloud virtual machine (VM), understands the full context of your project, and performs tasks such as writing tests, building new features, providing audio changelogs, fixing bugs, and bumping dependency versions.

Now Jules Tools and Jules API have been.

Initially Jules was available only in its web interface form which integrated seamlessly with GitHub:

• Connect to your GitHub account from Jule's interface
• Complete the login flow
• Choose all or specific repos that you want to connect to Jules
• You will be redirected back to Jules

Now you are ready to prompt. For instance, write a clear, specific prompt like:

Add a test for "parseQueryString function in utils.js

Now you can do the same but by using your CLI, since Google has brought Jules directly in your terminal. To get started with the CLI, install it first with

npm install -g @google/jules

And familiarize yourself with its Commands. For example the following command lists all your remote tasks:

jules remote list --task

You're now ready to go.

Now let's move onto the API counterpart, which makes it possible to fully integrate Jules into your own systems and workflows.

With the API, you can:

• Create custom integrations with tools like Slack for “ChatOps” workflows, allo wing you to assign tasks directly from your chat client.
• Automate bug fixing and feature implementation by connecting Jules to your project management tools like Linear or Jira.
• Integrate Jules directly into your CI/CD pipelines in services like GitHub Actions.

Here’s a quick example of how to create a new task (a “Session”) using a cURL command:

curl 'https://jules.googleapis.com/v1alpha/sessions' \
-X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H 'X-Goog-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
-d '{
"prompt": "Create a boba app!",
"sourceContext": {
"source": "sources/github/bobalover/boba",
"githubRepoContext": {
"startingBranch": "main"
    }
},
"title": "Boba App"
}'

To wrap it up, Jules is not in direct competition to other coding assistants such as Claude Code, since it is designed for maintenance work like:

• providing a diff of changes
• creating a PR of  changes
• labeling an issue to assign a task directly in GitHub

Since software engineering is not just coding, helper tools like this are very valuable.

More Information

Jules

Introducing the Jules API and CLI

Google Jules Coding Assistant Now Available

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