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Google AI Programming

Google Makes Gemini Code Assist Free (blog.google) 39

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Google has launched a free version of Gemini Code Assist, offering developers substantially higher usage limits than competing services. From a report: The AI coding assistant, powered by the fine-tuned Gemini 2.0 model, allows up to 180,000 code completions monthly -- 90 times more than GitHub Copilot's free tier limit of 2,000. The release comes just one day after Anthropic introduced Claude Code, underscoring intensifying competition in AI-powered development tools.

Gemini Code Assist integrates with popular environments including Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and GitHub, where it performs code reviews on both public and private repositories. Google's offering features a 128,000-token context window, enabling developers to work with larger codebases. The service supports all public domain programming languages and requires only a Gmail account to register, with no credit card needed.

According to Ryan Salva, Google Cloud's senior director of product management, more than 75% of developers now rely on AI in their daily work, with over 25% of new code at Google being AI-generated. For developers wanting advanced features like private repository integration or Google Cloud service connections, premium tiers remain available.
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Google Makes Gemini Code Assist Free More

Google Makes Gemini Code Assist Free

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  • They are fighting for a monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @12:51PM (#65194219)

    Whoever has the deepest pockets will win.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      I agree with your premise, but not with the "deepest pockets" part. Spending smart is crucial. In particular, bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the rules of the game in your favor or buying the judges (to prevent honest refereeing) are apparently the smartest investment strategies these years.

      But I need to stop fantasizing about solution approaches. "We can't get there from here." I think the new niche monopoly problem is tightly linked to how corporate profits are taxed, so one possible solution woul

  • Those were some good times.

  • This is a combination corporate need being fulfilled. Need number one is more training data. Need number two is addicting the users, and the "first hit is free" drug pusher thing works.

    • No company should be using their proprietary hard fought to create source code databases as their inputs to train their LLMs.

      • No company should be using their proprietary hard fought to create source code databases as their inputs to train their LLMs.

        While I agree, try telling that to managers who have attended an "AI seminar" hosted by the AI prophets telling them how you can either climb aboard the AI juggernaut now, or be run over by it in the coming months/years. Too many decision makers are hype glommers, and haven't paid enough attention to it to realize that these companies are absolutely using all data they have access to to train their AI systems. Data slurp is priority one through a thousand for them. And likely will continue to be for some ti

    • That's probably true, I definitely agree with the addiction model. .. but there is a side effect or corollary.. this looks lik an Amazon "grab market share early" type of move. It seems few can resist the lure of "free", and few are able to rethink things after getting used to things a certain way. People are so fixated on irrelevant details. Look at how nobody can get out of under Microsoft. The fear of changing anything keeps customers loyal (ish). It's funny that only a few years ago we were talking abou

  • At launch Gemini had some of the most laughable errors. And off and on I hear grumbling from Android users I know about not liking it replacing a meter working Google helper they used to have.

    Maybe because of that, or just because I don't think about it much, I've been experimenting with just about every other AI as a coding assistant, except Gemini.

    Has anyone used it for coding? Is it even any good? For some reason it just doesn't seem like Google has had a great team on their AI efforts.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'll give it a shot. I'm taking a few months off work and cancelling my github copilot sub. Good a time as any to try this Gemini.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Alright I tried it for a few minutes. So far I don't really like the context-sensitive code completions. Just now it twice tried to insert a } closing brace which would've broken the syntax. It wouldn't autocomplete a simple printf statement but would a std::cout statement. If I write a comment like "// broadcast x to a SIMD register" the next line will autocomplete with __m256d y = _mm256_set1_pd(x); which is what I was expecting. But if I say 'simd' instead of 'SIMD' it doesn't offer anything for autocomp

        • Thanks for the report. I keep forgetting you can tell CoPilot to use Claude, I should switch mine.

          I'm doing different coding (iOS development), for me I find the CoPilot integration kind of bad. It works using VisualStudio but that's just not as good a tool for general iOS dev work.

          I find CoPilot fires off suggestions maybe a bit too often, sometimes I just park my cursor somewhere to read through some code and bam, half a screen of CoPilot making up some complex function it would like to add. But when a

    • Gemini is pretty crappy at most things and when I use the LLM chatbot it spends more time apologising for getting things wrong than it does presenting useful information.

      Yesterday I tried Cursor as an LLM android code generator and was very impressed with the results. I haven't tried the AI assist in Android studio but I'll be comparing the two in coming days. Just as well this announcement was made -- I was *almost* going to lay down $20 a month for Cursor but if Gemini can do the same or better, I'll s

  • Because like social media or any other service, you are the product.

    • Because like social media or any other service, you are the product.

      In this particular case, you are the "trainer." You're helping them make a better product, which they hope to make good enough to be worth selling or renting to others after you've sunk a bunch of time into training it. That's the joy of these AI companies. All of them need your data and your time to make a system worth using.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Yeah to an extent but lets be real, very few people going to be paying privately for this. It was like double the price of copilot, more expensive than cursor, yet way behind on quality.

      Google will have to be giving this away to stay relevant here.

  • I used Gemini's Flash Thinking Experimental on a very well known language with piles and piles of data in its training data: scripting for the Windows command line. I'm rusty on that, so I thought it would be faster. It turns out after the initial code it writes I would have gotten things done faster by relearning everything I forgot and debugging it myself. It gives you code snippets with completely unrelated text arbitrarily placed in there, it forgets things three posts down, it thinks you're talking abo

  • We have an AI, and it can be used to replace you, we completely restructured out company so that the only people left are the ones that work on Gemini and you aren't using it. Please clap.

  • They didn't make it free so much as they forced it on you. You now have to go through a setup process where you sign away your rights and let them use everything on your phone or devices in order to let the voice assistant do something as simple as set up a calendar reminder.
  • What can the paid version do that the free can't? I asked Gemini to set up an email vacation reply for me, and it couldn't do that, so what can it do?

    • What can the paid version do that the free can't? I asked Gemini to set up an email vacation reply for me, and it couldn't do that, so what can it do?

      I installed the VSCode version because why not? I already primarily use Gemini for anything where I want code generated. It just does a better job with some of the esoteric JS stuff I work with.

      It's nice to have it right in the IDE, to be able to easily reference files as context, and less prone to weirdness from copypasta. All in all, I'll happily just use the plugin for most stuff.

      Requires auth from Google, and signing into a new service (which may be counter to goals of some folks reading this). But I'm

      • Fair enough, if it can do a good job, that's wonderful! I've used AI coding, it sometimes does an impressive job, but, I can't confirm the free vs paid difference. The free ones, work just as well as the paid versions, IMO.
  • Guess they will make it up in volume.

  • 180,000/month: Every 3.5 seconds (Score:3)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @02:55PM (#65194473) Homepage Journal

    Some simple math: If you're looking at 8-hour days, 5-days a week, on an average month, you can issue a request every 3.5 seconds.

    So this is, for all practical purposes, free for human use, but if you spam it with requests from another AI, for example, you'll run out.

  • Recent "Code-off" between AI bots. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @03:49PM (#65194641)
    For a private presentation I had to do this week I had to devise a group of C programming tests for multiple AI engines. My ranking right now is: ChatGPT #1, Grok #2, Claude #3, and Gemini was a distant #4. In some cases Grok beat ChatGPT, it was a narrow win. Even the best LLMs could only do about 30% of the tests correctly. They had the most trouble completing OS-specific code/drivers, constantly hallucinating between different platforms.

  • Lion's Mouth (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @07:18PM (#65195129) Homepage Journal

    Sure, I'll just paste my in-house proprietary codebase into Google.

    What could possibly go wrong.

    • Sure, I'll just paste my in-house proprietary codebase into Google.

      What could possibly go wrong.

      For open-source coders, this is not a concern.

  • I'll be able to use Gemini on my Jamboard to design games for Stadia that I can play through Chromecast. Will Gemini have APIs to query through Hangsout?

    (I wanted to include all of the projects, but the list is huge [killedbygoogle.com])

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