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Google is offering a significant boost to students and hobbyist coders by introducing Gemini Code Assistant, a free AI-powered tool that supports coding in all publicly available programming languages, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously accessible only to enterprise clients, Gemini Code Assistant is now available to everyone as a “practically unlimited” AI coding assistant, according to Google’s press release. The tool can handle up to 180,000 code completions a month, which Google claims is 90 times more than what other free coding assistants offer.

Unprecedented Code Completion

Ryan J. Salva, Google’s senior director of product responsible for developer experiences, noted that a full-time professional developer typically wouldn’t use all of these completions.

“You would have to be an incredibly dedicated developer, working 14 hours a day, every day, to hit those limits,” Salva explained.

Advanced Features and Capacity

Gemini Code Assistant boasts a robust support of 128,000 input tokens in its chat, capable of using natural language to generate, explain, or improve code. For instance, you could instruct Gemini to craft a script for sending a daily email with the weather forecast, resulting in functional code. However, the assistant is not yet advanced enough to allow a beginner to simply prompt it for creating a complete program from scratch.

The Future of Coding with AI

Salva predicts that by 2025, AI will assist developers in producing not only more code but also higher-quality code. Typically, software teams engage in code reviews, where a supervisor evaluates and provides improvement tips on the code.

Salva envisions AI agents within Gemini helping with these reviews, thereby freeing up more time for developers. Google also plans to release a public preview of Gemini Code Assist on GitHub.

“We’ve developed an AI agent that acts like a teammate or co-worker, reviewing code for defects,” Salva stated. “It checks whether best practices are followed and suggests ways to make the logic more refined.”

Positioning in the AI Landscape

The launch of Gemini Code Assistant comes amidst a rush by major tech companies to establish dominance in the AI sector. Currently, ChatGPT is the leading AI-assisted chatbot, with 400 million weekly users. Much of ChatGPT’s success can be attributed to its viral debut in late 2022. Establishing a platform as the default technology holds significant influence.

By making Code Assistant available for free, Salva believes it will encourage long-term use of Google’s AI services.

Empowering Creativity Through Natural Language

Beyond business motives, Salva highlights Gemini Code Assistant as a pivotal advancement in enabling programming through natural language, requiring minimal coding expertise.

“Large language models can handle the task of writing independent logic,” Salva remarked. “This makes humans far more inventive by boosting their creative output, as they are no longer constrained by language barriers.”