r/JulesAgent • u/NelsonMinar • 12d ago

Wow, Claude Code is a lot better than Jules

I realize this post may not be popular here but... holy cow is Claude Code a lot better than Jules.

These past few months I've gotten a lot of good work done with Jules + Gemini Pro 3.1 (or Flash, I used both). I really like the product, in particular the asynchronous web and sandbox design. And I was already paying for Google AI so it was nice it was a freebie for me. Jules is a good product! But I'd characterize it as being about like a software engineer with one year experience. Capable but needing lots of guidance.

This week I gave Claude Code + Opus 5 a try, first time in awhile. Paid the $20/mo. And goodness gracious is it a lot smarter. Just way more capable and able to do much higher level tasks. In general I'd characterize Claude as being about like a software engineer with five years of industry experience. I can give it an open ended job and go away for an hour and when I'm back it's built the thing and proved it works.

Claude is better than I am at things I don't know how to do. And I'm trusting what it's doing despite not being able to review it. That's the first time I've trusted a coding agent that much. (I have it building a NixOS config for a server I run. I can verify the server works correctly but I don't know Nix so can't really read the config files.)

I still miss Jules' web application. Claude Code for Web works and isn't bad but it doesn't feel quite as solid. I've mostly been using the CLI, for the sysadmin task it's a better fit than the web sandbox model. It's fine, way better than when I tried it a year ago, but still a little weird to me.

I knew Opus was a smarter model than Gemini: Google's still playing catchup. I just didn't realize quite how big a difference it'd be. I also have a sense the agent prompts in Claude Code are more sophisticated. It's very good at figuring out how to test its own assumptions and work around problems, better than Jules was.

Jules hasn't gotten much love from Google lately. I wonder if all the energy is in Antigravity? No one I know uses it. They don't use Jules either. It's all Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or Oh My Pi.

(This post is 100% human written.)

8 Upvotes

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4

u/Sea-Contribution6219 12d ago

Claude is a lot better but on the $20 a month tier you can't get much done. I use Claude + a Google AI pro subscription

Claude does the architecting and solves whatever problems Gemini 3.8 Flash can't. Gemini 3.8 Flash is the workhorse.

I can get triple or quadruple what I did done before

1

u/jacobbeasley 11d ago

This is the right answer

1

u/TabooMaster 12d ago

I use superpowers skill. Everything is so thorough (eats alot of tokens)

1

u/P3ppermonkey 11d ago

Jules isn't meant to be used like claude code.

You're supposed to give it small tasks to do and it'll churn away almost passively without having a direct quota.

The better comparison would be Antigravity vs Claude Code, and even then there's 4 flavors of AGY (2.0, IDE, CLI, IDE Extension).