Google's async coding agent Jules shuts down December 31; users must export data

Google's asynchronous coding agent Jules will shut down for good on December 31, 2026, and the service has already stopped accepting new work. According to a report on dev.to, the agent entered read-only mode on November 11, leaving users a closing window — 48 days by the article's count — to export their settings, memories and sessions before the platform goes dark.

The shutdown was announced on October 29 in the product's official changelog, in an entry titled "Jules Turndown." Google framed the closure as part of an effort to consolidate its agentic coding work rather than as a product failure, and no extension to the deadline has been announced. Sessions could be completed until November 11; since then the tool has been view-only, and it will stay that way until the end of the year.

What Jules did

Jules launched on May 19, 2025 with a straightforward proposition: hand it a task, and it would clone a GitHub repository into a cloud virtual machine, draft a plan, write code along with tests, and deliver a pull request. It left beta on August 6, 2025, having produced more than 140,000 public code commits in two months, according to the dev.to account. The free tier allowed 15 daily tasks with 3 running in parallel; Google AI Pro raised this to 100 tasks with 15 concurrent, and Ultra reached 300 tasks with 60 at once. In February 2026 the agent gained automatic fixing of CI failures and support for MCP servers, and in March it moved paid users onto Gemini 3.1 Pro.

What survives, and what does not

The code itself is not at risk. Branches and pull requests live in GitHub and stay there, because they were never Jules's to keep. What disappears is everything the agent stored on its side: account configuration, environment variables, scheduled tasks, connected repositories, the memories Jules accumulated about each project, environment setup scripts, and every session with its instructions, plan, activity log and patches. Unless it is exported before the deadline, it goes away with the service.

How to export

Google published the exit mechanism in the same notice. The export runs through Jules Tools, a command-line package: install it with npm install -g @google/jules, log in with jules login, and a terminal-based code agent performs the export from the user's home directory. The output lands in a local ~/jules-export folder containing a readable per-session summary plus configuration in JSON. The documentation carries two explicit warnings: the environment variable file contains real values, so the exported folder must be kept private and out of any repository; and if no GitHub account is connected, the export will arrive without repository data.

Antigravity takes over

Google says lessons from Jules are shaping products across the company, and it names one in particular: Google Antigravity, its agent-centric development platform. A guide published by Enjoy Dev on November 12 adds that Antigravity's remote agents — which can work in Google's cloud while the user's computer is off — finished rolling out to paid Pro and Ultra plans on November 9, two days before Jules went read-only. The sequencing reads less like coincidence than a handover: the replacement switched on first, then the original switched off.

Loose ends remain. Google has not described an automatic migration from Jules to Antigravity, has not said what happens to unexported data after December 31, and has not promised to preserve scheduled tasks or memories as they existed. PosixAI reported that in an email to users, Google Labs said AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will lose Jules from their plans after the shutdown date, with other benefits unchanged — subscribers who paid for 100 or 300 daily tasks get a deadline, not an equivalent. The dev.to article also points to a crowded field of alternatives, including DeepSeek's open-source agent for those who prefer self-hosting, and makes the practical point that switching agents takes an afternoon, while a project memory that no longer exists cannot be recovered at all.

Why it matters

Jules is a reminder that agent-generated context — memories, plans, session histories — typically lives inside the provider's service, not in your repository. When the service is retired, that context is deleted on the provider's schedule, not yours. For Google, the shutdown signals consolidation of its coding-agent efforts around Antigravity. For Jules users, the takeaway is narrow and time-bound: run the export before December 31, 2026, treat the output as sensitive, and accept that the paid task quotas simply end rather than carry over.