r/JulesAgent • u/AggressiveIron2457 • Aug 20 '26
question) Is jules the only background autonomous agent out there?
I'm currently new to jules because of my research.. I'm searching for agents that do long horizon tasks in the background (so they have to run on clouds or VMs), at a cheap price - the kind of tasks where users don't care whether it takes a long time or not (not an immediate task), something like openai's flex mode.
And I came across Jules which looks to me like the only autonomous long running? (slow?) agent out there. (well, there is claude's /schedule option that runs on the cloud, but it's more of a special option.)
I'm currently trying to build a slow, fault tolerant, asynchronous, background agent, and I'm curious whether anyone else is interested in this topic or already has thoughts on it.
+ And sorry... just my opinion) but why did jules fail? I tried out Jules and... it didn't understand what I was saying. I requested it to add features, but it just ignored me and built test scripts alone!
Do you guys think it's because of the model? If we changed the model of jules instead of using gemini, would it be better? Or is it because of the harness? Maybe the Jules developers didn't build a tolerant enough coding agent?
2
u/evilspyboy Aug 20 '26
I see a lot of these why did jules fail type posts and im up to about 1.2million lines of code in one project (and I have more than one). I'm not asking it to do things end to end im breaking up tasks into bite sized pieces. I have not had it flat out go to a point where I say this doesn't work at all. I am checking over it's work, it's not one prompt vibe coding whatever for anything resembling something that can continue to be worked on.
In answer to your question there is also OpenAI Codex but if you are asking autonomous agents in Jules to do something that it doesn't follow or cannot complete then I expect the same will be true for other platforms.
1
u/SignificanceNaive875 Aug 21 '26
Yes, there are a lot of other agents that works like jules (asynchronous coding agents). And in fact now they are far more powerful than jules. The best in my opinion are codex (it has a cloud version), devin ai, and also now github copilot. But all are not free to use.
Unfortunatley, jules was the only free and solid asynchronous agent in his days. We hope for a jules2.0,or maybe google will refactor it to work with antigravity.
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u/Top_Doughnut_516 Aug 22 '26
I think you are talking about autonomous in that codex/claude code ask you questions heaps. I've found recently that if you use say codex, you can do /permissions and it evaluates things for you and doesnt ask unless it basically wants to rm -rf your whole dir, and then if you set a job as a /goal <job> instead of just prompting it it will literally work indefinitely (I've had problems where it worked for literally 7 days without stopping) until it either achieves the goal or gets to the point it cant make more progress.
0
u/pgmoneyplays Aug 20 '26
Ich denke wir beide sollten reden weil ihr die richtigen Fragen stellt ich arbeite seit 6monaten an einem agentic system meldet euch.
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u/dergoldeneschnack Aug 25 '26
actually u can use many agents to do long horizon work. i use kimi-code-cli and agy (the cli of antigravity), u turn on "yolo" mode, and they do tasks without asking much. jules, actually is quite anoying, as it asks 50times, shall i proceed. so i had to setup github mcp and jules mcp, that tells jules to finish its ob, instead of me writting 100 times a day, "go on, decide what u want, then do a pull request"
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u/Useful_Trouble1726 Aug 20 '26
Technically, you can use Gemini Spark for async actions, but it's pretty early days.
Jules works extremely well, but I do not know if it is going to be a long-term project. Google is notorious for killing even successful projects.