Google Launches Gemini Code Assist

Google at yesterday’s Cloud Next conference showed an AI assistant for programmers with a code auto-completion function, Gemini Code Assist, aimed at corporate clients.

Previously, Google offered similar capabilities under the Duet AI brand – this service became publicly available at the end of 2023, and even then the company hinted that in the near future the service with the completion of lines of code would be transferred from the Codey model to the more modern Gemini. The release of Code Assist is both a major update and a rebranding of the old service. Code Assist will be available in plugin format for the most popular environments VS Code and JetBrains.

Even more so than its previous version, Duet AI, Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub Copilot Enterprise rather than its base version called Copilot. In particular, Gemini 1.5 Pro has a context window of a million tokens – this allows the system to offer its own code variants with higher accuracy, as well as analyze and change large fragments of it. Code Assist, like GitHub Copilot Enterprise, can be further customized based on a company’s internal code base—the feature is currently in preview.

Google is working with a number of developer-focused companies to bring their knowledge bases to Gemini. Earlier this year, Stack Overflow already announced a partnership with Google Cloud. Datadog, Datastax, Elastic, HashiCorp, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, Singlestore and Snyk now also partner with Google.