Google has launched a free version of its AI-powered coding tool called ‘Gemini Code Assist’ for Individuals. This tool is designed to help individual developers – such as students, freelancers, hobbyists, and startups – by providing features like code completion, code generation, and debugging assistance across various programming languages.
Speaking of detail, the AI coding assistance – launched in October 2024 – is powered by Gemini 2.0, a model fine-tuned specifically for programming. It supports all public-domain programming languages and provides high-quality code recommendations based on real-world coding scenarios.
The tool integrates with popular development environments like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs, allowing developers to receive real-time coding support without switching between different resources.
Compared to other free coding assistants, which often impose restrictive usage limits (like 2,000 code completions per month), Gemini Code Assist is much more generous, allowing up to 180,000 code completions per month – a limit so high that even professional developers are unlikely to exceed it.
Notably, while this free version offers substantial functionality, some advanced features available in the paid Standard and Enterprise versions, such as productivity metrics and integrations with Google Cloud services, are not included.
Meanwhile, with its latest move, Google is directly challenging Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot by offering an AI coding assistant at no cost for individual users. At the same time, the company presented Gemini Code Assist for GitHub.
“With Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, developers get a powerful helping hand that can detect stylistic issues and bugs and automatically suggest code changes and fixes. Offloading basic reviews to an AI agent can help make code repositories more maintainable and improve quality, allowing developers to focus on more complex tasks. It’s available directly in GitHub, where most open-source developers post and review code, via a GitHub app,” the tech giant said in a blog post.
This could make AI-powered coding more widely adopted. Talking about advantages, AI-assisted coding can speed up development, reduce errors, and improve productivity, making it easier to write, debug, and optimize code. There are several other free AI code assistants already on the market, including GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, Replit, Codeium, DeepCode, AlphaCode, IntelliCode, Amazon Q Developer (with a free tier), and CodeWP.
The development becomes noteworthy as a survey conducted by Stack Overflow in May 2024 revealed that 76% of respondents are either using or planning to use AI code assistants. The global AI code tools market was valued at approximately $4.86 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $26.03 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.1%.
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