February 26, 2025 – On the 25th of this month, Google announced the launch of a free version of Gemini Code Assist for individual developers. This move is aimed at making it easier for students, enthusiasts, freelancers, and startups to access a “latest AI-powered” programming assistant.
According to Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director of Product Management at Google, anyone can now learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify existing applications more conveniently without having to switch between different windows for help or copy-paste information from unrelated sources. “While other popular free programming assistants often limit code completions to 2,000 times per month, we want to provide a more generous service,” he said.
In contrast, Google offers up to 180,000 code completions per month, which the company describes as “such a high limit” that even the most dedicated professional developers would find it difficult to exceed.
The Gemini Code Assist for individuals is powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 model, which can generate complete code blocks, complete code while writing, and provide general programming assistance through a chatbot interface.
It has been learned that this free programming tool can be installed in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains development environments, and is compatible with all programming languages in the public domain.
Developers can use natural language to instruct Gemini Code Assist, such as asking the programming chatbot to “build a simple HTML form for me with name, email, and message fields, and then add a ‘submit’ button.”
Currently, it supports 38 languages and up to 128,000 chat input tokens in the context window, which is the amount of text that can be processed or “remembered” when generating a response.
However, the free personal edition does not include all the advanced business-oriented features available in the standard and enterprise editions of Gemini Code Assist. If there are requirements for productivity metrics, integration with Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, or customization of responses using private code data sources, users will need to upgrade to a paid version.
