Google has announced the public preview of Gemini Code Assist, a free AI-powered coding assistant for individuals. The tool is globally available and supports all programming languages in the public domain.
“More than 75% of developers are relying on AI in their daily responsibilities,” said Ryan J Salva, senior director of product at Google. “More than 25% of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers.”
Gemini Code Assist for individuals provides AI-driven code completion, generation, and chat capabilities. It is available in Visual Studio (VS) Code and JetBrains IDEs, as well as in Firebase and Android Studio. Google said its AI coding assistant offers “practically unlimited capacity with up to 1,80,000 code completions per month”.
The company also introduced Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, which offers AI-powered code reviews for both public and private repositories. The tool can detect stylistic issues and bugs, automatically suggesting code changes and fixes.
Developers can use natural language to generate, explain, and improve code. Google mentioned the tool allows prompts like “Build me a simple HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and then add a ‘submit’ button”.
The AI assistant includes a large context window that supports up to 1,28,000 input tokens in chat. This enables developers to work with large files and integrate local codebases.
Google aims to make AI coding tools accessible to students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups. “With a worldwide population of developers forecasted to grow to 57.8 million by 2028, we think AI should be available to them whether they can pay for it or not,” Salva said.
Sign-up requires only a personal Gmail account. Google is collecting user feedback from the public preview through feedback forms in IDEs and GitHub. Users interested in productivity metrics, private repository integrations, or Google Cloud service support can explore Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise.
