The public preview of Gemini Code Assist for individuals, a free version of the AI-coding assistant Gemini Code Assist, has now been announced. Offering AI-assisted coding help to developers worldwide, this free version provides generous usage limits and code review assistance.
Recent research indicates that over 75 per cent of developers utilise AI in their daily work. While well-resourced organisations are empowering their engineering teams with the latest AI capabilities, that level of tooling hasn’t always been accessible to students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups. With a worldwide population of developers forecasted to grow to 57.8 million by 2028, access to AI tools should be readily available, so users can start building with the standard digital tools of the future.
To bridge that gap, Gemini Code Assist for individuals is now globally accessible and powered by Gemini 2.0. It supports all public domain programming languages and is optimised specifically for coding. The Gemini 2.0 model underwent fine-tuning using a large dataset of real-world coding use cases, resulting in highly effective AI-generated recommendations. Unlike other free coding assistants with limited usage, such as 2,000 code completions per month, Gemini Code Assist offers up to 180,000 code completions monthly. This high ceiling ensures even the most demanding developers are unlikely to reach the limit.
Beyond code generation, Gemini Code Assist also facilitates improved code quality. Recognising the time-consuming nature of code reviews, the public preview of Gemini Code Assist for GitHub provides free, AI-powered code reviews for both public and private repositories.
AI coding assistance
To further enhance accessibility, the free version of Gemini Code Assist is available in Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. This integration provides the same capabilities previously offered to businesses, and currently available in Firebase and Android Studio, directly within developers’ working environments. Users can now conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify applications without switching between windows or copying information from disparate sources.
With a generous usage limit of up to 90 times more code completions per month than other free assistants, Gemini Code Assist caters to a wide range of developers. Students and professionals alike can benefit without fear of hitting usage caps or chat limits interrupting their workflow.
Gemini Code Assist for individuals features a large token context window, supporting up to 128,000 tokens in chat. This allows developers to utilise large files and provide Gemini Code Assist with a comprehensive understanding of their codebases.
The chat feature within Gemini Code Assist enables developers to focus on creative aspects of development by automating repetitive tasks like writing comments or generating automated tests.
Developers can use natural language to generate, explain, and improve code. For example, a freelance web developer can request a simple HTML form, while someone automating routine tasks can ask for a script that sends daily weather forecasts or explanations of Python code snippets.
Automating repetitive code reviews with Gemini Code Assist for GitHub
- With Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, developers get a powerful helping hand that can detect stylistic issues and bugs and automatically suggest code changes and fixes. Offloading basic reviews to an AI agent can help make code repositories more maintainable and improve quality, allowing developers to focus on more complex tasks. It’s available directly in GitHub, where most open-source developers post and review code, via a GitHub app.
- Different developer teams may also have different best practices, coding conventions and preferred frameworks and libraries. To address this need, Gemini Code Assist for GitHub supports custom style guides for code reviews. Each team can describe which instructions Gemini should follow when reviewing code in a .gemini/styleguide.md file in their repository. That way, Gemini tailors its code reviews to the needs of the repository.
Getting started
Getting started with Gemini Code Assist is simple. Users can sign up quickly with a personal Gmail account and install the tool in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, or JetBrains IDEs.
Feedback from the public preview will be used to further refine Gemini Code Assist. Users can submit feedback directly through the “Send feedback” form in the IDE or in GitHub. For those requiring advanced features like productivity metrics, customised AI responses based on private source code repositories, or integrations with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise are available.
Discussion about this post