Google unveiled Code Assist — an AI assistant for programmers

On Tuesday, February 25, company Google officially unveiled the new free version of its AI-powered code completion and editing tool Gemini Code Assist for Individuals. At the same time, Gemini Code Assist for GitHub was also announced — an agent for automatically searching for errors in the code and providing recommendations directly on GitHub.

TechCrunch writes about it.

Gemini Code Assist for individual users

This tool allows developers to communicate with Google’s Artificial Intelligence model in a chat window format to identify and fix errors, complete code fragments, or figure out the logic of complex areas. It’s similar to the popular Copilot from GitHub but with increased usage limits.

Gemini Code Assist for Individuals is built on a specially configured version of the Gemini 2.0 model and supports integration with the most common development environments, including VS Code and JetBrains. The tool works with many popular programming languages.

It is important to note that Code Assist for Individuals provides 180,000 code autocomplete per month, which is 90 times the free limit of GitHub Copilot (2,000 autocomplete). In addition, it offers 240 chat requests per day, which is almost five times more than the free Copilot plan.

Google notes that the Code Assist model for individual users is capable of processing up to 128,000 tokens in context. This is four times more than the closest competitors and allows analysing larger volumes of code.

Developers can sign up for the free public version of Gemini Code Assist for Individuals starting on Tuesday.

Gemini Code Assist for GitHub

Another innovation from Google is Code Assist for GitHub, which automatically scans pull requests for errors and offers additional useful recommendations.

The new tools come at a time when Google is actively competing with Microsoft and GitHub in the field of development solutions. Seven months ago, Google hired Ryan Salva, the former GitHub Copilot team leader, to lead developer tools at Google.

According to Salva, the company hopes to attract young developers with the free AI assistant with higher limits, who can later upgrade to the Code Assist enterprise plan. Google expects to make a profit from corporate tariffs.

Gemini Code Assist has been available for businesses for a year. In December, it was announced that this AI assistant would soon be able to integrate with third-party tools such as GitLab, GitHub, and Google Docs. Corporate tariff plans offer additional features such as audit logs, integration with other Google Cloud products, and settings for private repositories.

As a reminder, Google added the ability to automatically create searchable video transcripts to Google Drive. It will gradually become available to all Google Workspace users from February 24 to March 26.

We also wrote that Google is preparing a large-scale security update for 1.8 billion Gmail owners by changing the authorization method. The plan is to phase out the current SMS verification method. In the coming months, it will be replaced by a technology using QR codes.