[thorum]

Google’s ability to offer inference for free is a massive competitive advantage vs everyone else:

> Is Jules free of charge?

> Yes, for now, Jules is free of charge. Jules is in beta and available without payment while we learn from usage. In the future, we expect to introduce pricing, but our focus right now is improving the developer experience.

https://jules-documentation.web.app/faq

[diggan]

> Google’s ability to offer inference for free is a massive competitive advantage vs everyone else:

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).

[jsemrau]

Technically speaking,the strategy they execute is called "Loss Leader". As Loss Leader, the company offers a product at a reduced price to attract users, create stickiness, and through that aims to capture the market.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp

[dgb23]

"Loss leader" sounds way better than "price dumping".

[jimbokun]

It's the Costco Rotisserie Chicken of AI models!

[YetAnotherNick]

That's all good and well but its takes time to compare the products. And people are rarely willing to use paid product for comparison.

[diggan]

> That's all good and well but its takes time to compare the products

Hence many of us are still busy trying out Codex to it's full extent :)

> And people are rarely willing to use paid product for comparison.

Yeah, and I'm usually the same, unless there is some free trial or similar, I'm unlikely to spend money unless I know it's good.

My own calculation changed with the coming of better LLMs though. Even paying 200 EUR/month can be easily regained if you're say a freelance software engineer, so I'm starting to be a lot more flexible in "try for one month" subscriptions.

[xiphias2]

I haven't read too much from others, but personally for me Codex online form was the biggest productivity boost in coding since the original Copilot.

Cursor just deleted my unit tests too many times in agent mode.

Codex 5x-ed my output, though the code is worse than I would write it, at this point the productivity improvement with passing tests, not deleting tests is just too good to be ignored anymore.

[ijidak]

What do you mean by "online form"?

[diggan]

Codex seems to also be available via CLI (https://github.com/openai/codex) as well as via the web (https://chatgpt.com/codex).

[miki123211]

I just noticed that this is definitely true for me, but not if the product is pay to go.

I have far fewer qualms about spending $10 on credits, even if I decide the product isn't worth it and never actually spend those credits, than about taking a free trial for a $5 subscription.

[nathan_compton]

I tried using Codex today and it sucked real bad, so maybe Jules will actually be good?

[kristopolous]

$0 opens up new doors. You use it differently at $0. Fundamentally.

[vincnetas]

until you built your stuff on 0$ assumption start depending on it and then the price increases.

[jasonjmcghee]

And if it's a good product / you're locked in, you pay up.

[dmos62]

Well, this isn't the first github-based agent. A well-known one is https://app.all-hands.dev/. And, there are great cheap or even free more general agents. So, given that this agent isn't a novelty, price is naturally an immediate talking point.

[Y_Y]

I feel like this (and I know it's big tech tradition) had the same economic effect as dumping.

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

[jeffbee]

Google has been offering you "free inference" for more than a decade. People who never work there are simply not aware of how thorough soaked in machine inference many Google products are, especially the major ones like web search, mail, photos, etc.

[threatofrain]

This is standard startup play. Have a free beta stage and then transition into pricing.

[cheriot]

OpenAI lost $5 billion in 2024 and there are claims loses will double in 2025. For now, that's just the cost to play.

[candiddevmike]

You're the product here, though.

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

[jstummbillig]

I read that a couple of times. It sounds vaguely clever and a bit ominous, but I have no clue what it means. Can you explain?

Google products had had a net positive impact on my life over, what is it, 20 years now. If I had had to pay subscription fees over that span of time, for all the services that I use, that would have been a lot of very real money that I would not have right now.

Is there a next step where it all gets worse? When?

[add-sub-mul-div]

They're going to make so much money when nobody knows how to code or think anymore without the crutch.

[falcor84]

I'll just put this here:

> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

> What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.

- Plato quoting Socrates in "Phaedrus", circa 370 BCE

[brendoelfrendo]

Hm, I think Plato is largely true; not in the sense that writing is a harmful crutch, but in the sense that simply being able to read something is not a substitute for knowing it. I think we can see that at play here on HN and on the larger internet all the time: people who read a paper or article, and then attempt to discuss it, without realizing that their understanding of the material is entirely incorrect. These are "men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom," and they lack the awareness to understand that they don't understand.

In other words it is not the writing that is harmful, but the lack of teaching.

[falcor84]

I understand where Socrates/Plato is coming from, but this doesn't match my experience. I had no "lack of teaching", having sat through about 18 years of it in total, but I definitely have a better average recollection of things that I read of my own interest than things I was "taught". Maybe things would have been different if I had a world class philosopher as a personal tutor, but alas that was not to be.

If were to rephrase it, I would put the distinction not between teaching and reading, but between passive consumption and active learning.

EDIT: Thinking more about having a world class philosopher as a personal tutor, I suddenly remembered a quote from Russell that took me a while to track down, but here it is:

> In 343 B.C. he [Aristotle] became tutor to Alexander, then thirteen years old, and continued in that position until, at the age of sixteen ... Everything one would wish to know of the relations of Aristotle and Alexander is unascertainable, the more so as legends were soon invented on the subject. There are letters between them which are generally regarded as forgeries. People who admire both men suppose that the tutor influenced the pupil. Hegel thinks that Alexander's career shows the practical usefulness of philosophy. As to this, A. W. Benn says: "It would be unfortunate if philosophy had no better testimonial to show for herself than the character of Alexander. . . . Arrogant, drunken, cruel, vindictive, and grossly superstitious, he united the vices of a Highland chieftain to the frenzy of an Oriental despot."

> ... As to Aristotle's influence on him, we are left free to conjecture whatever seems to us most plausible. For my part, I should suppose it nil.

- "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, Chapter XIX p. 160

[noduerme]

But did you memorize that quote, or was it sufficient to know its gist so you could google it?

[Avicebron]

At least with writing it's fairly easy to implement on your own with little more than what most people would have available in a rudimentary survival situation. It'll be a tough day when someone goes to sign into their GoogleLife (tm) and find out that they can't get AI access because "precluding conditions agreed to upon signing"

[falcor84]

As I see it, the solution to this is to invest in open source. As for a "survival situation", a solar-powered laptop with a locally running LLM would definitely be the first item on my list.

[falcor84]

Oh definitely the latter. My memory is too far gone from a lifetime of reading. May the next generation avoid my dire fate.

[noduerme]

I mean, that's all any of us needs. It's an honorable quote.

I know you're not trying to draw any parallels between Plato's admonition on written thoughts supplanting true knowledge and the justifiable concerns about automated writing tools supplanting the ability of writers to think. To a modern literate, Plato's concern is legible but so patently ridiculous that one could only deploy it as a parody and mockery of the people who might take it as a serious proof that philosophers were wrong about modern tools before. I was obviously just kiddin about whether you googled it. Unfortunately, now a whole new generation is about to use it to justify how LLMs are just being maligned the way written language once was.

Socrates was wrong on this. But Plato was kind of an asshole for writing it down. The proof of both is that we can now google the quote, which is objectively funny. The trouble with LLMs, I guess, is that they would just attribute the quote to your uncle Bob, who also said that cats are a good source of fiber, and thus the whole project started when the words were put in parchment ends with a blizzard of illegible scribbles. If writing was bad for true understanding, not-writing is where humanity just shits its pants.

[-__---____-ZXyw]

But are you filled with wisdom, or with the conceit of wisdom?

[noduerme]

Niether. I'm just filled with half baked knowledge that I have to check a lot on wikipedia.

[85392_school]

There are some limits:

> 2 concurrent tasks

> 5 total tasks per day

[spongebobstoes]

5 tasks per day is low enough to be roughly useless for serious work

[sigmar]

It isn't "5 prompts." A single task is more like a "project" where you can repeatedly extend, re-prompt, and revise.

[mark_l_watson]

No, one task is a complete work cycle. I was only able to use up three tasks yesterday.