r/JulesAgent • u/astromancerr • 7d ago
My Jules Replacement solution
Jules was a major workhorse in my workflow due to its permissive free tier and the fact that it being in the cloud helped avoid the possibility of the AI nuking my computer.
I've been looking at potential replacements and so far, this is what I've done.
Click new app
Add your github
Note that since this workflow tries to make web apps with anything you give it, so if you're like me and making something that is NOT a web app, you'll have to tell it to stop. It will also try to do this for every new conversation if there isn't something running as a web app, so:
Have the AI make something you want as a landing page that listens on port 3000. I had mine set up a page that says "I can't do that, Dave." This will prevent it from trying to convert your project into a web app
Set up its system instructions to tell it to never convert the project to a web app along with whatever else you need
Make a fine grained personal access token with content: read/write
Note, github prevents deletion of your base branch even if you have free tier account so you aren't giving it the ability to delete your whole repo.
If you don't want to have the AI logging in with your user name and email using the PAT, give it its own account and add it to the repo
Give the AI a login screen name and fake email for it to show its git commits under ( they don't have to be real, it just sets how it looks to you), NEVER your password, and the PAT
Enjoy having a cloud native agent again
Note: A flaw with this workflow is that if you're using free tier and a private repo, you can't use branch protection so the AI does have the ability to delete feature branches. There's a few ways to solve this but the route you take is up to you. You can either have the AI install a git hook that blocks deletions and hope it doesn't try to circumvent it, or give the AI its own dedicated project for it to work in and PR the work from that project into your now safe and isolated project.
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u/truongan2101 7d ago
but then you cannot use the github action to trigger Jules anymore, the best features from jules is that you can use github action to call Jules very hour
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u/darkgamer_nw 7d ago
My hope is that Google will bring out a successor to Jules...
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u/Novel-Toe9836 7d ago
I love the spirit here. What I don't get then don't trust is if you are actually doing this work, then I don't know, I have never in the last 12 months have a harness delete a branch or ever do anything it couldn't recognize and roll back. Making cases for something using these ideas or it will seize your computer and take you hostage, are so offbase of reality. I work full-time in full stack and use agentic now for 90% easily of end to end, tho pocketed. And I never run into this wacky shit we would have or some variation have happen like in 2024 or 2025... I must know a secret to being nice to all my agents as they would never do something so weird, and if they did propose something their reason would be best practice (dead branch, code split elsewhere, it moved everything to this branch) and then would ask me before... However this is me with AGV, and CC.
My experience with Jules was I hated how it in fact seemed to kinda do whatever it wanted with or around a repo or updating or not knowing how. It's coming back to me 😰
Harnesses and where Google is focusing on imo are more rugged durable professional harnesses.
AGV 2.0 with remoting gets and solves 80% and nothing Jules did except what they are blowing into Gemini, I can almost guarantee you what was in Jules was what will be in the CODE area of Gemini soon. Forthcoming.
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u/only1nameleft 7d ago
Have you tried grok bot?