[LINK] Google Gemini’s AI coding tool is now free

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Google Gemini’s AI coding tool is now free for individual users

And provides 90 times more monthly code completions than GitHub Copilot’s free tier.

by Jess Weatherbed Feb 25, 2025
https://www.theverge.com/news/618839/google-gemini-ai-code-assist-free-individuals-availability  (22 Comments)


A free version of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused AI coding tool, is now available globally for solo developers.

Google announced today that Gemini Code Assist for individuals is launching in public preview, aiming to make coding assistants “with the latest AI capabilities” more accessible for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups.

“Now anyone can more conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify their existing applications — all without needing to toggle between different windows for help or to copy and paste information from disconnected sources,” said Ryan J. Salva, Google’s senior director of product management.

“While other popular free coding assistants have restrictive usage limits, with usually only 2,000 code completions per month, we wanted to offer something more generous.”

That feels particularly targeted at GitHub Copilot, the most direct competitor to Gemini Code Assist, which also provides a free user tier that’s limited to 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot Chat messages each month.

Google is offering up to 180,000 code completions per month by contrast, which it describes as “a ceiling so high that even today’s most dedicated professional developers would be hard-pressed to exceed it.”

 [Caption: A GIF demonstrating Google’s Gemini Code Assist tool. Here’s a quick demo of Gemini Code Assist in action. GIF: Google]

Like the enterprise version, Gemini Code Assist for individuals is powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 artificial intelligence model and can generate entire code blocks, complete code as you write, and provide general coding assistance via a chatbot interface.

The free coding tool can be installed in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains developer environments and supports all programming languages in the public domain.

Developers can instruct Gemini Code Assist using natural language, such as asking the coding chatbot to “build me a simple HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and then add a ‘submit’ button.”

It currently supports 38 languages and up to 128,000 chat input tokens in the token context window, which is the amount of text (tokens) that can be processed or “remembered” when generating a response.

The free Individual tier seems pretty expansive, but it doesn’t include all of the advanced business-focused features available in the Standard and Enterprise versions of Gemini Code Assist.

If you want productivity metrics, integrations with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, or to customize responses using private code data sources then you’ll need to use Google’s paid tiers.

Comments

subscriber
Having stopped coding for 20 years or so due to a career change, and just picked it up again recently when I started coaching a First Tech Challenge team, the AI coding helper is life changing. I keep imagining the huge amount of time I would have saved back then when I was coding full time.

subscriber
As someone who still codes daily, and has been using Copilot since it became free... it's okay. Saves me a bit of time here and there, but it frequently gets things wrong. Often in subtle ways that can take a while to spot if you're not being careful.

subscriber
(Edited)
It's really nice for simple things like getting the basics of a webpage fleshed out or for getting something started. Full disclosure I haven't tried CoPilot or this new Gemini but I have tried an older Gemini (around 1.0 release) and ChatGPT many times and a few times in my experience they have hallucinated NuGet packages that I couldn't find or maybe have been deprecated to solve more complex issues.

subscriber
I would be curious to know how will Foogle use the data for the training. Nothing is free. But still it’s a food offer particularly ror students and startups. So, cool I guess !!

You can disable telemetry within the plugin settings or just not use it at all if you're really worried about it.

You're the product of course.

subscriber
Interesting. Now tell me how do I access it? Google Search is not helping.
https://cloud.google.com/products/gemini/code-assist

subscriber
(Edited)
Just searched “google code assistant” in Google Search and literally the first result was the site and had everything needed to get started. lol
Should have read the article. Tells you how to install it.
Does it though? I only read: "The free coding tool can be installed in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains developer environments and supports all programming languages in the public domain."

Nothing about which plugin to install at all.
(Edited)
-- never mind --