Jed Borovik, Product Lead at Google Labs, joins Latent Space to unpack how Google is building the future of AI-powered software development with Jules. From his journey discovering GenAI through Stable Diffusion to leading one of the most ambitious coding agent projects in tech, Borovik shares behind-the-scenes insights into how Google Labs operates at the intersection of DeepMind's model development and product innovation.
We explore Jules' approach to autonomous coding agents and why they run on their own infrastructure, how Google simplified their agent scaffolding as models improved, and why embeddings-based RAG is giving way to attention-based search. Borovik reveals how developers are using Jules for hours or even days at a time, the challenges of managing context windows that push 2 million tokens, and why coding agents represent both the most important AI application and the clearest path to AGI.
This conversation reveals Google's positioning in the coding agent race, the evolution from internal tools to public products, and what founders, developers, and AI engineers should understand about building for a future where AI becomes the new brush for software engineering.
Chapters
- 00:00:00 Introduction and GitHub Universe Recap
- 00:00:57 New York Tech Scene and East Coast Hackathons
- 00:02:19 From Google Search to AI Coding: Jed's Journey
- 00:04:19 Google Labs Mission and DeepMind Collaboration
- 00:06:41 Jules: Autonomous Coding Agents Explained
- 00:09:39 The Evolution of Agent Scaffolding and Model Quality
- 00:11:30 RAG vs Attention: The Shift in Code Understanding
- 00:13:49 Jules' Journey from Preview to Production
- 00:15:05 AI Engineer Summit: Community Building and Networking
- 00:25:06 Context Management in Long-Running Agents
- 00:29:02 The Future of Software Engineering with AI
- 00:36:26 Beyond Vibe Coding: Spec Development and Verification
- 00:40:20 Multimodal Input and Computer Use for Coding Agents
