Meet Jules Tools: A Command Line Companion for Google’s Async Coding Agent

You can now work with Jules directly in your command line. Jules is our asynchronous coding agent that integrates directly with your existing repositories, understands the full context of your project, and performs tasks such as writing tests, building new features, providing audio changelogs, fixing bugs, and bumping dependency versions.

Until today, you’ve primarily interacted with Jules in your web browser, but we know developers live in the terminal. It’s where we test, build, debug, and ship. That’s why we built Jules Tools, a lightweight command line interface, so you can spin up tasks, inspect what Jules is doing, and make the agent your own, all without leaving your workflow.

Why a toolkit?

Jules already runs in the background, powering tasks in remote VMs and synching with your repos. When you start a task, it spins up a temporary VM, does the work there, and sends back a pull request. Nothing runs until you ask it to. The command line gives you even more direct control and visibility. It makes Jules programmable, scriptable, and customizable. You can integrate it into your own automations, or just type a few quick commands to steer Jules in real time.

Think of Jules Tools as both a dashboard and a command surface for your coding agent.

Installation

The easiest way to get started is with npm:

npm install -g jules-tools

Shell

This prints a guide and shows you how Jules Tools works. At its core, the CLI is built around commands and flags:

Commands tell Jules what to do. For example this command lists all your remote tasks.

jules remote list --task

Shell

Flags let you make Jules your own. For example, this flag switches to a light-themed terminal interface.

jules --theme light

Shell

Practical examples

Because Jules Tools is scriptable, you can compose it with other CLI tools to fit your workflow. Here are some ways developers are already using it:

# List all the repos connected to Jules
jules remote list --repo
 
# Create a remote task in a repo
jules remote new --repo torvalds/linux --task "write unit tests"
 
# Assign multiple tasks from a TODO file
cat TODO.md | while IFS= read -r line; do
  jules remote new --repo . --task "$line"
done
 
# Pipe GitHub issues directly to Jules
gh issue list --assignee @me --limit 1 --json title \
  | jq -r '.[0].title' \
  | jules remote new --repo .
 
# Use Gemini CLI to analyze GitHub issues and send the hardest one to Jules
gemini -p "which is the most tedious issue, print it verbatim" \
  | gh issue list --assignee @me \
  | jules remote new --repo .

Shell

Jules Tools isn’t just an interface, it’s a way to wire Jules into everything you already do at the terminal.

Explore the dashboard

For developers who prefer interactive flows, Jules Tools also offers a TUI. Commands like /remote give you a dashboard view of tasks, while /new walks you through creating one step by step. It’s the same control you’d expect from the web UI, just faster and closer to where you already work locally.

Looking ahead: hybrid by design

We believe the future of development tools is hybrid. Jules Tools points in that direction:

Local + remote: use your own machine when you want, spin up multiple VMs when you need scale.
Do-it-yourself + delegation: stay hands-on with code while also offloading work to Jules.

You can even test this out now with the experimental —-future flag, which previews hybrid behaviors we’re exploring. (This isn’t part of this week’s launch, but we’d love your early thoughts.)

Try it today

Jules Tools makes your coding agent more tangible. It’s not just something running in the cloud, it’s right there in your terminal, responding to you.

Install with npm, run your first command, and see how Jules fits into your flow.