IBL News | New York
Google announced a free Gemini Code Assist for individuals in public preview. It is powered by the Gemini 2.0 model and “with the latest AI capabilities.” It can generate entire code blocks and supports 38 programming languages.
The free coding tool can be installed in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains developer environments.
Developers can instruct Gemini Code Assist using a chat interface by asking, for example, to “build me a simple HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and then add a ‘submit’ button.”
With this offer, Google targets GitHub Copilot, its most direct competitor. GitHub Copilot also provides a free tier of 2,000 code completions and 50 monthly Copilot Chat messages.
Meanwhile, Google offers up to 180,000 code completions per month, “a ceiling so high that even today’s most dedicated professional developers would be hard-pressed to exceed it,” said Ryan J. Salva, Google’s senior director of product management.
The free Individual tier doesn’t include advanced business-focused features available in the Standard and Enterprise versions, such as productivity metrics, integrations with Google Cloud BigQuery services, or customized responses using private code data.
