Google is throwing a major lifeline to students and hobbyist coders with Gemini Code Assistant, a free AI coding assistant that supports all publicly available coding languages, the company said Tuesday.
Gemini Code Assistant, previously available only for enterprise customers, will give everyone access to a “practically unlimited” AI coding assistant, the company said in a press release. Gemini Code Assistant allows 180,000 completions per month, which Google says is 90 times more code completions than other free coding assistants on the market.
“A professional developer coding every day is probably going to use maybe half of that,” said Ryan J. Salva, senior director of product at Google in charge of developer experiences. “You would have to be a wildly dedicated developer coding 14 hours a day, every day, just banging on it in order to get to those limits.”
Google says Gemini Code Assistant has a generous 128,000 input token support in chat and can use natural language to help generate, explain or improve code. For example, you could ask Gemini to write a script that sends a daily email with the latest weather forecast and get workable code. Code Assistant, however, isn’t at the level where a novice can simply give Gemini Code Assistant a prompt and develop a fully fledged program.
Salva sees 2025 as the year when AI helps coders not only produce more code but better-quality code. Within software teams, it’s common for developers to go through code review, in which their code is overlooked by a supervisor who then gives them tips on how to improve. Salva says AI agents within Gemini can help with this, freeing up more time for developers. Google also will have a public preview of Gemini Code Assist for GitHub.
“We’ve built an AI agent that performs the work of a teammate or a co-worker who reviews the code contributed for defects,” Salva said, “looking for, ‘are you following best practices?’ [or] ‘Are there ways to make the logic more elegant?'”
Google’s release of Gemini Code Assistant comes as Big Tech is quickly trying to mark areas of AI dominance. Right now, ChatGPT is considered the default for AI-assisted chatbots, with 400 million weekly users. Some of ChatGPT’s success has to do with its viral launch in late 2022. There’s tremendous power in being considered the default piece of technology. By making Code Assistant freely available, Salva says the business case is to help drive lifelong adoption of Google’s AI services.
Business cases aside, Salva sees Gemini Code Assistant as a major step in helping people begin making programs in natural language, where little coding knowledge is required.
“The large language models can do the work of writing the independent logic for you,” Salva said. “And this makes humans a lot more creative… it increases their creative output because they no longer have that language barrier.”
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