AI coding's cost-and-control phase: Goldman narrows access, Google retires Jules

Gartner's forecast is blunt. By 2028, AI coding costs will surpass the average developer's salary as token consumption surges. Without a governed engineering operating model, the firm warns, spending on AI tools will keep rising faster than the productivity gains those tools are meant to deliver.

Amit Choudhary, global chief operating officer at Thoughtworks, put the operational case to iTnews Asia. Speeding up code generation by 50 percent is irrelevant, he said, if security reviews, architectural integration and deployment pipelines remain choked. Adoption is not in dispute. An Agoda study cited in the same interview found that 95 percent of developers across Southeast Asia now use AI weekly.

Goldman narrows the door

Goldman Sachs moved the other way, and quietly. Most employees lost access to advanced AI coding tools, including Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, according to Bloomberg, which cited internal guidelines from October. Only engineers keep them.

Traders and bankers had spent months using the tools to monitor trading flows and produce content. Goldman spokesperson Nick Carcaterra cited "a variety of factors including productivity and risk management" and said the experimentation phase is over. The reversal is sharp. In July, chief information officer Marco Argenti praised "vibe coding" by non-technical staff. He described a trader building a quick prototype with AI and handing it to an engineer to scale.

Google retires Jules

Google is consolidating rather than expanding. It will shut down Jules, its AI coding agent, on 31 December 2026, and the service goes read-only on 11 November 2026. Google says Jules' technologies and developments will be integrated into Antigravity, its AI development platform.

Google calls Jules an experiment. The company said the tool helped it understand how AI agents could assist software developers. It has not disclosed how many people used Jules, or whether low usage contributed to the closure. Nor has it announced an automatic transfer of existing projects and settings to Antigravity. The two outlets describe the timeline differently. ProPakistani dates public availability to August 2025, while dev.ua says the project launched in December 2024 and reached worldwide public beta in May 2025.

Verification becomes the product

Microsoft's answer is measurement. It released Scope, a free open-source tool that records how an AI coding assistant completes a task: which tools it calls, which instructions it follows and which files it creates. Microsoft spent more than a year building it.

The internal numbers are the interesting part. Microsoft's Azure Cosmos DB team used Scope to find and fix 20 problems in its development tools and 27 issues in its documentation. Correct use of one database feature rose from 47 percent to 100 percent in tests. Those results come from specific tests. Human checking is getting weaker too. Anthropic researchers surveyed 52 software engineers using Python. Those who used AI averaged 50 percent on a quiz, against 67 percent for those who coded by hand.

Tooling data points the same way. The 2026 Python Typing Survey drew 1,794 responses. AI tools wrote type hints for 42.5 percent of 1,517 respondents, and 24.4 percent of those 1,517 said an AI coding tool invoked their checker. The share who said AI makes generated code more accurate rose from 18.5 percent in 2025 to 38.4 percent in 2026. Security lags. The Register reported on 29 October that researchers found bugs in five AI developer tools, with OpenAI and Microsoft flaws still unpatched.

What happens next

Jules users have a deadline, not a migration path. Active sessions must be finished by 11 November 2026, and account settings, session history and activity logs should be exported before the 31 December shutdown. Code, branches and pull requests already on GitHub remain available there after Jules closes.

Goldman has not said whether access will widen again. Its spokesperson framed the change as limiting the tools to the people best suited to use them long term.