Google Is Killing Jules: The Coding Agent Shuts Down December 31

Short answer: Google will shut down Jules, its asynchronous coding agent, on December 31. Sessions stay open until November 11, then the service turns read-only, and Google is pushing that work into Antigravity. It also shipped an export command that copies settings, memories and session history to a local folder.

Google is shutting down Jules, the background coding agent it first showed off next to Gemini 2.0 in December 2024. The notice landed on the Jules changelog last Thursday, unsigned and short. You have until November 11 to finish whatever is still running. Then the product goes read-only. Then, on the last day of the year, it stops existing.

That is 13 days of normal use, counted from the notice. The tool had been publicly available since May 2025, which works out to about 528 days of life before the email arrived.

What Google actually said

The changelog entry, dated October 29, is framed as housekeeping, not a failure. Google calls it "part of our work to unify our agentic coding efforts" and says what people built with Jules "taught us where agentic development is headed." Nowhere does the post mention a bug, an outage or a security problem. No date is given for when the background-task features actually reach Antigravity. It is a product decision, made quietly, on a Thursday.

The export is the practical part, and it is the only part Google did properly. Run npm install -g @google/jules, sign in, and you get a folder with account settings, environment variables, scheduled tasks, connected repositories, memories, setup scripts and every session, including the prompt, the plan, the full activity log and the code patches. Google's own notes warn that the access token expires about an hour after login, so if every call returns a 401, sign in again.

One warning in Google's own documentation matters: the file called env-variables.json holds your environment variable values in plain text. Keep that folder off your repositories. Your code, branches and pull requests were never inside Jules anyway. Those live on GitHub and stay there.

Jules in numbers, and why the numbers were bad

Google has never published a user count for Jules, so the best evidence comes from public GitHub activity. The coding agents index from Amplifying tracks agent-marked pull requests across repositories and puts Jules at roughly 100K a month and 1.2 million all time. Claude Code does 2.6 million a month. Codex does 851,000.

The sharper number is the merge rate. Of the settled pull requests in that sample, 63.2% of Jules work was merged, against 87.8% for Codex. An agent whose output gets thrown away a third of the time is not saving you anything. It is adding a review queue.

Agent	Pull requests a month	Merge rate	Owner
Claude Code	2.6M		Anthropic
Codex	851K	87.8%	OpenAI
Cursor	404K		Anysphere
Jules	100K	63.2%	Google
Copilot agent	58K		GitHub

The trend line is worse than the level. Jules pull requests fell 30% month over month in August, while Codex grew 13% and Cursor grew 50%. In repositories owned by organisations, the best public proxy for real company money, Jules accounted for 2,632 pull requests a week. Claude Code accounted for 129,000. That is not a close race.

Why it died: the model picker gave it away

Users spotted the ending before Google announced it. On X, @solomonneas wrote that Jules "was already on life support" because the model picker "still tops out at gemini 3.1 pro and 3.6 flash, while gemini 4 argon is already in antigravity." A coding agent is only as good as the model behind it, and Jules stopped getting the good one.

Speed complaints were everywhere. One r/JulesAgent thread from April described the same task running through Jules and GitHub Copilot: Copilot finished in six minutes, Jules was still going after 35. Another user tallied roughly 70% of sessions failing with "Jules was unable to complete the task" over two weeks.

Then there is the money. On Hacker News, commenter mkobit put it plainly: "I can't imagine this was at all economically feasible." He also named the parts he would miss, which tells you where the product actually worked. Scheduled runs. Commenting on a GitHub pull request and having the agent answer. A simple API for small delegated jobs.

Google has been folding its developer tools into one surface for months. Gemini CLI was retired for consumer tiers in June and replaced by the Antigravity CLI. Gemini Code Assist subscriptions for individuals stopped taking new customers in October. Jules was the last standalone piece, and now it is gone too.

The line in the export guide that stings

Google's own instructions for rescuing your data say this: install Jules Tools, then "open a CLI coding agent, such as Claude Code, from your home directory and paste the export prompt below." The only agent named as an example is Anthropic's. Not Antigravity. Not Gemini CLI.

People noticed. TestingCatalog, which tracks unreleased AI features, argued that Jules v2 got planned at exactly the moment Google had to answer Codex, and the rewrite lost that fight. Hacker News commenter hjotha summed up the loss in one line: "no more 100 PRs a day for free. i'm so sad."

The grief is real in places. @_InYOB_ told the Jules account that "Jules is 90% of the reason I signed up for AI pro." Another user said Jules was the best cloud tool of its kind for automations, which is the part Antigravity does not obviously replace. And the jokes wrote themselves, because this is Google. @kaluops asked whether anyone was "keeping odds on how long antigravity gets."

There is a number behind that joke. The volunteer-run Killed by Google list held 307 retired apps, services and devices as of September, with a median lifespan of about four years. Jules did not even get two.

Antigravity got a plugin store the same day

Hours after the turndown notice went out, the Antigravity team published a Plugin Marketplace. It runs in the desktop app and in the CLI. One command does the install: agy plugin install <plugin-name>.

A plugin bundles up to five things that used to be separate chores: skills, MCP server configs, rules, lifecycle hooks and custom subagents. Instead of wiring an MCP endpoint and an API token by hand in every repo, you click once and the whole package installs, updates and toggles together. The launch partners include Figma, Linear, Notion, Stripe, Supabase, Vercel, Canva, Firebase, Chrome DevTools and BigQuery.

Read the two announcements side by side and the strategy is obvious. Google is not exiting agentic coding. It is consolidating onto one surface and closing everything that competes with it, even when that surface is its own. The marketplace opened with 10 named partners, from Figma to Vercel. Honestly, that is the least flattering reading of the week, and it also happens to be the one the dates support.

	Jules	Antigravity
Where it ran	Headless Google Cloud VM, no editor	Desktop app, CLI, IDE extensions, SDK
Started	December 2024, a Google Labs experiment	November 18, 2025, alongside Gemini 3
Free access	15 tasks a day, three at once	Free preview, quota refreshed every five hours
Status	Read-only within weeks, dead at year end	Shipping weekly, plugin store added the same day

If you used Jules, do this before the deadline

Finish the sessions you care about first, because that is the part with a hard cutoff, and you have roughly 12 days. Run the export while sessions are still live, since the script reads them through an internal endpoint that the public CLI does not fully expose. Then check that ~/jules-export actually contains a folder per repo with its setup script and memories, plus a readable summary.md per session.

Do not assume your quota transfers. On Google's AI developers forum, a user named dubcube asked the obvious question and got no public answer: Jules came with its own daily task allowance on AI Pro, counted separately from everything else, so will Antigravity receive matching quota, or will the same work now eat the Antigravity budget and push you into paid overages? Antigravity's quota is compute-based, refreshed every five hours, with AI credits as the overage mechanism. Nothing in the notice promises a replacement.

For Indian developers this bites a little differently. Google AI Pro is ₹1,950 a month here, and the Jio bundle handed out 18 months of it free, which is how a lot of people met Jules in the first place. Antigravity sits on the same subscription, with limited agent requests on the cheapest tier, expanded on Pro and higher limits above that.

Plan (India)	Price a month	Antigravity agent requests
Google AI Plus	₹399	Limited
Google AI Pro	₹1,950	Expanded
Google AI Ultra 5x	₹6,500	Higher
Google AI Ultra 20x	₹19,500	Highest

My read: if Jules was your night shift, do not just move to Antigravity and hope. Antigravity 2.0 is an app you sit in front of. It has scheduled tasks and subagents now, and the CLI runs headless, but Google has not said it will run your jobs on its own cloud machines the way Jules did. That was the whole point of the product for a lot of people. @jj_kovacs said half of why they used async agents was "not opening an editor at all."

FAQ

Is Jules shutting down completely?

Yes. Google says the service winds down on December 31. It goes read-only after November 11, which means you can look at old sessions but cannot start or continue work.

Will I lose my code and pull requests?

No. Branches, commits and pull requests were always stored on GitHub, so they stay where they are. What disappears is the context inside Jules: memories, setup scripts, scheduled tasks and session logs.

What replaces the extra daily task allowance I had on AI Pro?

Google has not said. Antigravity draws from a compute-based quota that refreshes every 5 hours, with AI credits sold as overage. No surprise that the silence annoyed paying subscribers. A user on Google's developer forum asked for the replacement allowance in writing and has not received a public answer.

Does Antigravity run in the cloud like Jules did?

Partly. The Antigravity CLI runs in local shells, remote cloud environments and SSH sessions, and there is a Remote Control feature for driving sessions from a browser. Google has not promised the same always-on cloud VM that cloned your repo and opened a PR while you slept.

Should I trust Antigravity to last?

That is the fair question, and Google has not helped itself here. More than 300 Google products have died since 2006, with a median lifespan around four years. Antigravity ships weekly and now has a plugin ecosystem. That's a good sign, not a guarantee.

The short version: Jules lost the model race, lost the merge rate, and lost the internal fight to Antigravity. I'm not saying Antigravity is a bad product. It shipped 194 fixes across nine releases in four weeks this autumn, which is a real cadence. But if you have work sitting in Jules, the clock is running and the export is one command away.

📚 Sources

#	Source	Used for	Link
1	Jules changelog	Turndown dates, export contents, Claude Code line	jules.google/docs
2	Amplifying coding agents index	Jules PR volume, merge rates, org-repo share	amplifying.ai
3	Google Antigravity blog	Plugin Marketplace launch, plugin components, install command	antigravity.google/blog
4	Hacker News thread	User reactions from mkobit, hjotha and rvz	news.ycombinator.com
5	FourWeekMBA	Day counts between notice, read-only and shutdown	fourweekmba.com
6	Google AI plans, India	Rupee pricing and Antigravity request tiers	one.google.com
7	Antigravity plans docs	Compute-based quota, five-hour refresh, AI credits	antigravity.google/docs
8	Google AI developers forum	Unanswered question about replacing Jules task allowance	discuss.ai.google.dev
9	Killed by Google	307 retired products, four-year median lifespan	killedbygoogle.com
10	JetBrains developer survey via Presenc AI	Antigravity and Claude Code workplace adoption	presenc.ai