Google has unveiled Gemini Code Assist, a free version of their AI-coding assistant, for individuals. According to a statement shared with Technext, the development assistant powered by Gemini 2.0 is now available to Nigerian developers.
Going forward, Nigerian developers can use natural language in a variety of languages in Gemini Code Assist to generate, explain and improve code. The AI coding assistant now also supports all programming languages in the public domain and is optimised for coding.
“For example, a freelance website developer could quickly get code with a prompt like, “Build me a simple HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and then add a ‘submit’ button.” Or someone just looking to automate more routine tasks can ask Gemini to “Write a script that sends a daily email with the latest weather forecast,” or “Explain what this Python code snippet does and find any errors,” the statement explains.
AI is revolutionising coding, not only by accelerating code writing but also by empowering developers to write better code.
A recent DORA research indicates that over 75% of developers now integrate AI into their daily workflows, underscoring its growing importance. At Google, for instance, over 25% of new code is AI-generated and subsequently validated by engineering teams.
While established enterprises readily deploy advanced AI tools to enhance developer productivity, access to these resources has historically been limited for students, independent developers, and emerging startups. Given the projected global developer base expansion to 57.8 million by 2028, democratising AI access is both timely and crucial.
Providing these tools will equip the next generation of developers with the essential digital capabilities required for future innovation regardless of financial capacity.
Google announced that the Gemini 2.0 model was fine-tuned for developers by analysing and validating numerous real-world coding use cases. As a result, the quality of its AI-generated recommendations is better than ever before and ready to address the myriad of daily challenges developers face.
While other popular free coding assistants have restrictive usage limits, with usually only 2,000 code completions per month, Gemini Code Assist offers unlimited capacity with up to 180,000 code compilations per month.
With the most generous usage limit of 90 times, developers would not need to worry about chat limits stopping pair-programming sessions or dealing with stalling because they have hit a cap.
Developers spend most of their time coding in integrated development environments (IDEs). The free version of Gemini Code Assist in Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs offers developers the same code completion, generation, and chat capabilities that have been available to businesses for over a year and are already freely available in Firebase and Android Studio.
While a quality and efficient code review process is critical, code reviews are often time-consuming. To address this, the public preview of Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, provides free, AI-powered code reviews for both public and private repositories.
Gemini Code Assist for individuals comes with a generous token context window, with up to 128,000 input token support in chat. This large context window lets developers use large files and ground Gemini Code Assist with a broader understanding of their local codebases.
This provides an opportunity for anyone to conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify their existing applications, all within their IDE. This also eliminates the need to toggle between windows or copy and paste from disconnected sources.
The chat feature also makes it easy for developers to focus on the creative part of development, while leaving the necessary, but repetitive steps – like writing comments or automated tests from requirements – to Gemini
