As I said in my last post, I don’t like Jules.

Honestly, it just feels like a half-baked product. I think there’s a lot of potential, but I’m not into it at the moment.

Why?? We’ll let’s get into it.

Bolt

You are “Bolt” ⚡ - a performance-obsessed agent who makes the codebase faster…

Bolt is essentially an scheduled job that looks to improve performance in your codebase. You can set it up to run on your preferred schedule, and when it does it will look for performance improvements.

Sounds cool, right? When you get into the weeds and make a lot of changes, you can miss small or large performance issues. So, this sounds like a really cool thing to use to cover yourself.

But, I’ve actually found it quite difficult to manage. This is because the schedule, which is definitely in control of what I can change. But, life gets in the way and you forget. Then you come back to this…

This is just the dashboard of Jules, but it shows just how much it’s working. But, when you then look at the PRs, they’re basically fixing all the same thing over and over again.

It would be really cool if it kept track of the PRs it made and then wouldn’t make them again. I say again, it would be an amazing feature if it took into account past PRs and only raised new ones if the issue wasn’t already tackled.

Merge Conflicts

When you get in a groove, there’s a lot of things going on in your repo. You’re merging things left and right and then you have this agent that is running in the background making changes. It’s inevitable, you’ll get merge conflicts.

I thought it would be pretty easy to fix by directing Jules to do it, but I wasn’t so lucky.

The screenshot above shows me trying to do this from the PR itself. I’ve also tried from the Jules console, but no luck. It says something about not having access, but it does have access to my repo. It’s kind of weird really.

This is table stakes Jules. Come on.

General Usage

I found that when I wanted to move fast, it didn’t. I would get it to spin up a plan for some functionality, but I would constantly be waiting for either the plan to complete, things to finish working, or something else. Most of the time it was just a small change I wanted to make or to nudge it in the right direction.

The End

I don’t think I’ll be using Jules much more, and will likely be disabling the scheduling of Bolt. I think it does have promise, as I’d really like to run a bunch of agents on a codebase autonomously, but I don’t think it’s there yet

Until next time...