I've been using AI coding agents since the very early days of Aider and I think this is not quite true. There's a place for async agents. There's a place for collaborative agents. Collaborative agents may even soon be delegating off to multiple async agents and picking best results. There's so much complexity here and we haven't even begun to explore a corner of the possible design space. We're still trying to plug AIs into human-shaped holes instead of building around their interesting/weird capabilities.

Would you be willing to point me to a primer of how I can get started with building agents?

This week I experimented with building a simple planner/reviewer “agentic” iterative pipeline to automate an analysis workflow.

It was effectively me dipping my toes into this field, and I am so floored to learn more. But I’m unsure of where to start, since everything seems so fast paced.

I’m also unsure of how to experiment, since APIs rack up fees pretty quickly. Maybe local models?

Personally I found the mini SWE-agent to be a very approachable introduction to building agents: https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent

There are a number of free and cheap LLM options to experiment with. Google offers a decent free plan for Gemini (get some extra Google accounts). Groq has a free tier including some good open weight models. There's also free endpoints on OpenRouter that are limited but might be useful for long running background agents. DeepSeek v3.2, Qwen3, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.6 are all good choices for cheap and capable models.

Local models are generally not a shortcut to cheap and effective AI. It's a fun thing to explore though.

You can directly use Claude Code via its scriptable API (things like --verbose --output-format json --input-format json --include-partial-messages

and then use your existing Anthropic plan. Otherwise yeah you'll have to start using API tokens:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-agents-with-t...

or you can pretend to be claude code in api calls

I think they are doing both (in true Google fashion), there is an open source Gemini cli with a generous free tier that more directly competes with Claude code. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli

It was pretty rough at launch but has gotten a lot better. So has Claude code though, so I’ve never really switched over.

I fail to see how comparing Jules to Claude Code is relevant. They’re completely different.

A good Jules comparison would be OpenAI Codex.

For a Claude Code Google equivalent there’s Gemini Code Assist CLI

Exactly. As the sibling comments point out. Async and collaborative are different ways to work. Both have its place.

Tbf, you can install Claude Code to GitHub. Then you can mention @claude and ask it to do things.

But Jules is more sophisticated though.

You mean giving an agent access to your user space and hoping nothing goes wrong?

The default installation for claude code is hilariously insecure and the only times I've used it is in a fully sandboxed VM.

Jules reminds me more of https://github.com/features/spark if comparing things