Google launches AI coding assistant, Gemini Code Assist, free for individual users

Google has unveiled a new AI coding tool for enterprises called Gemini Code Assist, which is available for free to individual users. In a blog post making the announcement, the company said that the tool is being launched in public preview today with the goal to make new AI capabilities “more accessible for students, hobbyists, freelancers and startups.”

The company also rolled out a code review “agent” that automatically finds bugs in code and gives suggestions to developers on GitHub called Gemini Code Assist for GitHub.

Gemini Code Assist was built on top of Google’s Gemini 2.0 and just like GitHub Copilot is able to complete code, generate code and offer coding assistance via a chat window. It can work with Visual Studio Code, GitHub and JetBrains via plugins while supporting all programming languages.

“While other popular free coding assistants have restrictive usage limits, with usually only 2,000 code completions per month, we wanted to offer something more generous. We’re offering practically unlimited capacity with up to 180,000 code completions per month using Gemini Code Assist – a ceiling so high that even today’s most dedicated professional developers would be hard-pressed to exceed it,” Ryan J. Salva, senior director of product management at Google noted in the blog. 

This sets it up nicely against GitHub Copilot plan which Salva clearly refers to but doesn’t explicitly mention.

Currently supporting 38 languages, Gemini Code Assist has up to 128,000 chat input tokens which is how much text the model is able to process in a single prompt. 

There is the free Individual tier and the advanced business features are all packed in for the Standard and Enterprise tiers for the tool.