Back in December, GitHub, the world"s most popular developer platform, crossed 150 million developers. To celebrate this milestone, GitHub Copilot was made free for all VS Code users with capabilities including chat and code completions, multi-file edits, multi-model choice, third-party extensions support, and more.
The free version of GitHub Copilot comes with several limitations, such as support for up to 2000 real-time code suggestions and up to 50 messages and interactions per month. Today, Google announced that Code Assist, its AI-based developer assistant, is now available for free with near-unlimited code completions.
Gemini Code Assist, powered by Gemini 2.0, is now available for individuals worldwide with support for all programming languages in the public domain. Google claims that it fine-tuned the Gemini 2.0 model for developers based on real-world coding use cases.
More importantly, Gemini Code Assist now offers up to 180,000 code completions per month. It comes with a large token context window, with up to 128,000 input token support in chat. In addition to code completions, Gemini Code Assist can also support code reviews.
The public preview of Gemini Code Assist for GitHub can offer AI-powered code reviews for both public and private repositories. Gemini Code Assist extensions are available for Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs.
Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director, Product Management, Google, wrote the following regarding the new free Code Assist launch:
"And with the most generous usage limit of 90 times more code completions per month than other popular free coding assistants, coders of all types can reap the rewards. If you’re a student working on a time-sensitive project, you won’t find your coding project suddenly stalled because you’ve hit a cap, or have to worry about chat limits stopping your pair-programming sessions."
To get started with this new Code Assist, developers just need a personal Gmail account and no credit card is needed. For large enterprises, Google announced the enterprise version of Code Assist last year. Gemini Code Assist Enterprise supports productivity metrics, customized AI responses based on private source code repositories, integrations with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, and more.