Individual developers can now use the AI-supported code assistant Google Gemini Code Assist for free. The new feature Gemini Code Assist for GitHub should help automate parts of the code review workflow.
Google Gemini Code Assist is a tool that helps developers explain code written by colleagues or create their code from the starting point. For the latter functionality, users only need to describe exactly what the new code should perform and what programming language it should be written in.
The code assistant supports all known programming languages and works with all popular code editors from Microsoft and JetBrains.
Features free tier
The free tier lets developers submit up to 6,000 daily requests or 180,000 monthly. This is ninety times more than Microsoft’s free tier of GitHub Copilot, with which it competes.
The free version of Gemini Code Assist also lets users create prompts of up to 128,000 tokens. This means it has a large context window, allowing developers to combine a request to generate code with contextual information. Think of programming examples that can help the code assistant with higher-quality output.
Under the hood, Google Gemini Code Assist is built on the tech giant’s latest Gemini 2.0 LLM, which is optimized specifically for coding. The model used has been further fine-tuned by analyzing and validating a large number of real use cases, making this version of the code assistant better than ever in the eyes of the tech giant.
Gemini Code Assist for GitHub
In addition to the free version of Google Gemini Code Assist, Google released another preview tool for developers: Gemini Code Assist for GitHub. This AI-based assistant allows developers to automate parts of the code review workflow.
The intelligent assistant helps developers automatically summarize their pull requests, making it easier for colleagues to review them. The AI also automatically checks new code for bugs.
Another feature is that Gemini Code Assist for GitHub detects if a piece of code needs to be rewritten because it is difficult to understand or does not meet a company’s best practices.
The paid versions of Gemini Code Assist continue to exist despite the now free tier. These versions offer even more AI features, such as writing requests for BigQuery and improving AI-generated code based on a company’s existing code.