Simon Willison’s Weblog

Jules, our asynchronous coding agent, is now available for everyone (via) I wrote about the Jules beta back in May. Google's version of the OpenAI Codex PR-submitting hosted coding tool graduated from beta today.

I'm mainly linking to this now because I like the new term they are using in this blog entry: Asynchronous coding agent. I like it so much I gave it a tag.

I continue to avoid the term "agent" as infuriatingly vague, but I can grudgingly accept it when accompanied by a prefix that clarifies the type of agent we are talking about. "Asynchronous coding agent" feels just about obvious enough to me to be useful.

... I just ran a Google search for "asynchronous coding agent" -jules and came up with a few more notable examples of this name being used elsewhere:

• Introducing Open SWE: An Open-Source Asynchronous Coding Agent is an announcement from LangChain just this morning of their take on this pattern. They provide a hosted version (bring your own API keys) or you can run it yourself with their MIT licensed code.
• The press release for GitHub's own version of this GitHub Introduces Coding Agent For GitHub Copilot states that "GitHub Copilot now includes an asynchronous coding agent".