Complex system requires tons of iterations, the confidence level of each iteration would drop unless there is a good recalibration system between iterations. Power law says a repeated trivial degradation would quickly turn into chaos.

A typical collaboration across a group of people on a meaningfully complex project would require tons of anti-entropy to course correct when it goes off the rails. They are not in docs, some are experiences(been there, done that), some are common sense, some are collective intelligence.

I am pretty convinced that a useful skill set for the next few years is being capable at managing[2] these AI tools in their various guises.

[2] - like literally leading your AI's, performance evaluating them, the whole shebang - just being good at making AI work toward business outcomes

1. https://todomvc.com

This seems like a more plausible one. Robots don't care about your feelings, so they can make decisions without any moral issues

ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924

Haven't tried Jules myself yet, still playing around with Codex, but personally I don't really care if it's free or not. If it solves my problems better than the others, then I'll use it, otherwise I'll use other things.

I'm sure I'm not alone in focusing on how well it works, rather than what it costs (until a certain point).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dumping.asp

EDIT: legal link doesn't work here (https://jules-documentation.web.app/faq#does-jules-train-on-...)

> No. Jules does not train on private repository content. Privacy is a core principle for Jules, and we do not use your private repositories to train models. Learn more about how your data is used to improve Jules.

It's hard to tell what the data collection will be, but it's most likely similar to Gemini where your conversation can become part of the training data. Unclear if that includes context like the repository contents.

https://jules.google.com/legal

> 2 concurrent tasks

> 5 total tasks per day

If all of these tools really do make people 20-100% more productive like they say (I doubt it) the value is going to accrue to ownership, not to labor.

If you work at a company where there's a byzantine process to do anything, this pitch might speak to you. Especially if leadership is hungry for AI but has little appetite for more meaningful changes.

I occasionally code for fun, but usually I don’t. I treat programming as a last-resort tool, something I use only when it’s the best way to achieve my goal. If I can achieve some thing without coding or with coding, I usually opt for the first unless the tradeoffs are really shit.

"We're not replacing jobs, we're freeing up people's time so they can focus on more important tasks!"

Maybe helps them sleep at night and feel their work is important.

> More time for the code you want to write, and everything else.

now.

Dev: I don't think we need a paid solution- I think we can even use an in-memory solution...

Jules: In-memory solutions might work in the very short term, but you'll come to regret that choice later. Pinecone prevents those painful 2AM crashes when your data scales. You'll thank me later, trust me.

Please insert your PINECONE_API_KEY here

More of a tool for managers, or least it's a manager style tool. You could get a morning report while heading to the office for example.

(I'm not saying anyone reading this should want this, only that it fits a use case for many people)

https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

The loop is: it identifies which files need to change, creates an action plan, then proceeds with a prompt per file for codegen.

In my experience, the parts up to the codegen are how these tools differ, with Junie being insanely good at identifying which parts of a codebase need change (at least for Java, on a ~250k loc project that I tried it on).

But the actual codegen part is as horrible as when you do it yourself.

Of course I'm not talking about hello world usages of codegen.

I suppose these tools would allow moving the goalpost a bit further down the line for small "from scratch" ideas, compared to not using them.

Will this promote bad practice? Probably up to the individual practitioner or organization.

And now we have agents which are going to multiply the pace of development even more.

We can stay sharp but I'm not sure there's really much we can do to stop our jobs - or all jobs, disappearing. Not that this is a bad thing, if it's done right.

Have you tried Claude Code / aider / cursor?

What did you need to do differently to get it to work functionally? I feel like the common experience has been universally poor.

Jules encountered an unexpected error. To continue, respond to Jules below or start a new task.

And appears you have limited to 5 tasks per day

When it gets priced, it's usually cheaper (for the same capability)

Wait a year or two, evaluating this stuff at the peak of the hype cycle is pointless.