Google LLC today made Gemini Code Assist, its artificial intelligence programming assistant, available at no charge for individual developers.

The new free tier supports up to 6,000 requests per day or 180,000 per month. That’s 90 times higher than the usage cap GitHub applies to the free tier of GitHub Copilot, its competing AI coding assistant. The increased competition from Google might prompt the Microsoft Corp. unit to boost its usage cap or provide features currently only available in paid plans. 

Gemini Code Assist launched last year at the search giant’s Cloud Next conference. It works with popular code editors from Microsoft and JetBrains SRO. In those editors’ interface, the service takes the form of a chatbot sidebar next to the main window.

Developers can ask Gemini Code Assist to explain a piece of code written by a colleague. The chatbot is also capable of generating new code from scratch. According to Google, the user only has to describe what the new code snippet should do and the programming language in which it should be written. Gemini Code Assist supports all programming languages in the public domain.

The service’s new free tier supports prompts with up to 128,000 tokens. One token corresponds to a few letters or numbers. The large context window allows developers to combine a code generation request with contextual information, such as programming examples, that can help Gemini Code Assist generate higher-quality output.

The service processes prompts with Gemini 2.0, the latest iteration of Google’s flagship large language model series. In December, the company revealed a midrange model from the series called Gemini 2.0 Flash. It provides higher output quality than the top-end edition of Google’s previous flagship LLM with twice the response speed.

The version of Gemini 2.0 that powers Gemini Code Assistant is optimized for programming tasks. “We fine-tuned the Gemini 2.0 model for developers by analyzing and validating a large number of real-world coding use cases,” Ryan Salva, a senior director of product management at Google, detailed in a blog post. “As a result, the quality of AI-generated recommendations in Gemini Code Assist is better than ever before.”

Alongside the launch of the new free tier, Google today debuted a feature called Gemini Code Assist for GitHub in preview. It’s designed to automate parts of the code review workflow. 

When developers update an application, they package the changes into a proposal called a pull request. The new code only rolls out to production after the pull request is approved by colleagues. Many enterprises rely on GitHub’s software hosting platform to power this workflow.

According to Google, Gemini Code Assist for GitHub automatically summarizes pull requests to help developers review their contents. The AI also checks the new code for bugs. It can detect other issues as well, such as cases where a code snippet should be rewritten because it’s difficult to understand or doesn’t adhere to company best practices. 

Google will continue offering the original paid editions of Gemini Code Assistant alongside the new free tier. Those plans include integrations that allow the AI to perform tasks in Google Cloud services, such as writing queries for the BigQuery data warehouse. The paid versions can also improve the quality of AI-generated programming suggestions by taking into account a company’s existing code.

Image: Google