Google Gemini’s AI Coding Tool is Now Free for Individual Users

Gemini Code Assist
Shubham Kumar
By Shubham KumarWriter

Gemini Code Assist

Google has officially released a free version of its AI-powered coding assistant, Gemini Code Assist, making it available to independent coders worldwide.

This change will benefit students, hobbyists, freelancers, and start-up developers looking for an advanced AI-powered coding assistant previously available to Enterprises via paid plans.

Gemini Code Assist creating code based on natural language prompt and applying the change to existing code
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Credit: Google
Gemini Code Assist creating code based on natural language prompt and applying the change to existing code

Gemini Code Assist's free version is expected to do coding chores, including generating code blocks, completing code snippets, debugging, and modifying applications. Unlike other free coding assistants with strict usage caps, Google allows up to 180,000 code completions per month, i.e., a significantly higher limit compared to competitors like GitHub Copilot, which only allows 2,000 completions monthly.

This tool, powered by Google's latest Gemini 2.0 AI model, provides a seamless coding experience across several integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and GitHub.

Users can interact with the AI using a chatbot interface, which makes it easy to request code snippets in natural language. For example, a user can simply ask Gemini Code Assist, "Generate a Python script that scrapes data from a website," and it will provide an optimized solution.

One of the main advantages of Gemini Code Assist is its expansive context window, which can hold up to 128,000 tokens. This means that the tool can handle and remember greater amounts of data, making it more useful for difficult coding tasks. Additionally, it supports all publicly available programming languages, making it more versatile for different development projects.

Gemini Code Assist provides a summary of a pull request and improvement suggestions. Then, when prompted, Gemini provides code readability suggestions.
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Credit: Google
Gemini Code Assist provides a summary of a pull request and improvement suggestions. Then, when prompted, Gemini provides code readability suggestions.

However, the free version does lack some business-specific capabilities included in the Standard and Enterprise tiers. Advanced features like productivity metrics, integration with Google Cloud Services, and customization using private code data sources are only available to paid users.

To access Gemini Code Assist, users simply require a personal Google account. The tool is currently in public preview and can be installed in popular coding environments, providing developers with a reliable and cost-free alternative to AI-assisted coding.

With this release, Google aims to promote AI-powered development, providing more people with access to cutting-edge coding assistance.