A free version of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s AI-driven coding tool tailored for businesses, is now universally accessible for individual developers. Google revealed today that Gemini Code Assist for solo users is entering public preview, intending to make coding assistants featuring the “latest AI functionalities” more available for students, enthusiasts, freelancers, and emerging companies.
“Now anyone can more easily learn, create code snippets, troubleshoot, and adjust their existing applications — all without needing to switch between various windows for assistance or to copy and paste information from disjointed sources,” commented Ryan J. Salva, Google’s senior director of product management. “While other widely-used free coding assistants impose strict usage restrictions, commonly allowing only 2,000 code completions per month, we aimed to provide something much more accommodating.”
This particularly seems directed at GitHub Copilot, the closest rival to Gemini Code Assist, which likewise features a free user tier that is confined to 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot Chat messages monthly. Google, in contrast, offers a staggering 180,000 code completions each month, which it characterizes as “a threshold so elevated that even the most committed professional developers today would struggle to surpass it.”
Similar to the enterprise edition, Gemini Code Assist for individuals employs Google’s Gemini 2.0 artificial intelligence model and can generate entire code blocks, complete code as you write, and offer general coding assistance using a chatbot interface. This free coding tool can be integrated with Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains development environments and supports all programming languages in the public domain.
Developers can command Gemini Code Assist using natural language, for instance, asking the coding chatbot to “create a straightforward HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and subsequently add a ‘submit’ button.” It currently accommodates 38 languages and up to 128,000 chat input tokens in the token context window, which indicates the amount of text (tokens) that can be processed or “remembered” when generating a response.
The complimentary Individual tier appears quite extensive, yet it does not encompass all of the advanced business-oriented features found in the Standard and Enterprise versions of Gemini Code Assist. If you seek productivity metrics, connections with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, or customization of responses through private code data sources, you’ll need to utilize Google’s paid tiers.
