Generative AI has wormed its way into myriad products and services, some of which benefit more from these tools than others. Coding with AI has proven to be a better application than most, with individual developers and big companies leaning heavily on generative tools to create and debug programs. Now, indie developers have access to a new AI coding tool free of charge—Google has announced that Gemini Code Assist is available to everyone.
Gemini Code Assist was first released late last year as an enterprise tool, and the new version has almost all the same features. While you can use the standard Gemini or another AI model like ChatGPT to work on coding questions, Gemini Code Assist was designed to fully integrate with the tools developers are already using. Thus, you can tap the power of a large language model (LLM) without jumping between windows. With Gemini Code Assist connected to your development environment, the model will remain aware of your code and ready to swoop in with suggestions. The model can also address specific challenges per your requests, and you can chat with the model about your code, provided it’s a public domain language.
At launch, Gemini Code Assist pricing started at $45 per month per user. Now, it costs nothing for individual developers, and the limits on the free tier are generous. Google says the product offers 180,000 code completions per month, which it claims is enough that even prolific professional developers won’t run out. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which offers similar features with a limit of just 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot chat messages per month. Google did the math to point out Gemini Code Assist offers 90 times the completions of Copilot.
The underlying technology is unchanged from the enterprise-only era of Code Assist. It’s still based on the latest Gemini 2.0 LLM and has been optimized for coding. Google claims a large context window is essential to making AI coding useful for all devs. By Google’s reasoning, Code Assist should be able to handle even complex programming problems with its 128,000 input token limit.
Gemini Code Assist integrates with numerous popular IDEs and platforms, including Firebase, Visual Studio, and GitHub, where it will compete directly with Microsoft’s less generous AI coding tools. Like Microsoft, Google has invested heavily in data centers to run AI workloads, but no matter how efficiently Google builds, it’s not getting inference for free. Rolling out Gemini Code Assist with these very high limits could help get devs embedded in Google’s Gemini ecosystem, steering them away from Microsoft and OpenAI. That could pay dividends if these AI tools stand the test of time.
Google notes the new Gemini Code Assist for individuals is still a preview, so the functionality may change over time. It’s also missing some of the features from the enterprise release, like productivity metrics and customized AI responses. Google says if you want those, the paid version is where you want to be.