Google shelves Jitro self‑coding project

Google has not publicly confirmed that it shelved “Jitro,” and the only verifiable reporting so far points the other way: a next-generation Jules coding agent was still being described as in development this week. (devops.com) The name “Jitro” appears in recent reports as an internal label for a new version of Jules, Google’s coding agent. TestingCatalog reported on April 6 that Google was building a “Jules V2” around higher-level goals rather than one-off prompts. (testingcatalog.com) Google’s own public product pages still show Jules as active. Google said on May 20, 2025 that Jules had entered public beta, and Google later said on August 6, 2025 that the product was out of beta and available publicly. (blog.google, blog.google) Jules is not a chat box that writes a few lines and stops. Google says it clones a repository into a Google Cloud virtual machine, works asynchronously in the background, and returns a plan, reasoning, and code changes for review. (blog.google) That matters for the Jitro reports because the claimed change is about how much initiative the software takes. DevOps.com and TestingCatalog both described Jitro as a system aimed at broad outcomes such as test coverage or accessibility, instead of waiting for a developer to specify each task. (devops.com, testingcatalog.com) Google’s current public messaging for Jules already leans in that direction. The live Jules site says users can “delegate your backlog” and “let Jules proactively find and fix code improvements,” which is closer to ongoing maintenance than simple autocomplete. (jules.google.com) Google has also tied Jules to paid artificial intelligence subscriptions, another sign that the company has not walked away from the category. Google’s usage page says Jules is included in Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra plans. (jules.google/docs/usage-limits/) The strongest public numbers on Jules came from Google’s August 6, 2025 post. The company said beta users completed tens of thousands of tasks and shared more than 140,000 code improvements publicly. (blog.google) The timing of the Jitro chatter also fits a product-preview cycle, not a cancellation notice. TestingCatalog linked the reported work to Google I/O 2026, and Google’s official I/O site says this year’s conference opens on May 19, 2026. (testingcatalog.com, io.google) What is missing is just as important as what is public. There is no official Google announcement in the sources reviewed here saying Jitro was dropped, paused, or canceled, and the recent named reports available on the open web describe it as an internal effort that was still moving forward as of April 6 to April 8. (testingcatalog.com, devops.com) So the cleanest reading today is narrower than the social posts suggest: Jitro remains an unannounced internal project, Jules remains a live public product, and there is no public evidence yet that Google has shelved the work. (blog.google, jules.google.com, devops.com)