Google has unveiled Gemini Code Assist for individuals, a free version of their AI-coding assistant. This development assistant powered by Gemini 2.0 is now available to Nigerian developers and it supports all programming languages in the public domain and more importantly, it is optimised for coding.
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, 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, regardless of financial capacity, equips the next generation of developers with the essential digital capabilities required for future innovation.
The Gemini 2.0 model was fine-tuned for developers by analysing and validating a large number of real-world coding use cases. As a result, the quality of AI-generated recommendations in Gemini Code Assist 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 practically unlimited capacity with up to 180,000 code compilations per month – a high standard that is seldom reached by even the most dedicated professional developers.
AI is revolutionising coding, not only by accelerating code writing but also by empowering developers to write better code. 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, which provides free, AI-powered code reviews for both public and private repositories.
Developers spend most of their time coding in integrated development environments (IDEs). Now, 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. This provides an opportunity for anyone to conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify their existing applications, all within their IDE, eliminating the need to toggle between windows or copy and paste from disconnected sources.
With the most generous usage limit of 90 times, more code completions per month than other popular free coding assistants, coders have a huge opportunity, whether as a student working on a time-sensitive project, there would be no need to worry about chat limits stopping pair – programming sessions or dealing with stalling because you hit a cap.
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.
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.
Caption: Gemini Code Assist provides a summary of a pull request and improvement suggestions. Then, when prompted, Gemini provides code readability suggestions.
Nigerian developers can use natural language in a variety of languages in Gemini Code Assist to generate, explain and improve code. 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.”
Code review is one of the most critical, albeit time consuming, parts of software development. With Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, Nigerian developers get a powerful helping hand that can detect stylistic issues and bugs and automatically suggest code changes and fixes. Offloading basic reviews to an AI agent can help make code repositories more maintainable and improve quality, allowing developers to focus on more complex tasks. It’s available directly in GitHub, where most open-source developers post and review code, via a GitHub app.
Different developer teams may also have different best practices, coding conventions and preferred frameworks and libraries. To address this need, Gemini Code Assist for GitHub supports custom style guides for code reviews. Each team can describe which instructions Gemini should follow when reviewing code in a .gemini/styleguide.md file in their repository. That way, Gemini tailors its code reviews to the needs of the repository.
Whether a student building an interactive data visualization using JavaScript, or a freelance developer testing ideas for an application or game, you can use Gemini Code Assist to help you get your project done faster, with more expertise, at no cost.
Signup is quick and easy, and only requires a personal Gmail account, no credit card needed. Nigerian developers can get started by installing Gemini Code Assist in Visual Studio Code, GitHub or JetBrains IDEs.
With user feedback on this public preview, Google will continue to fine-tune Gemini Code Assist. Users can share feedback right from the “Send feedback” form in the IDE or in GitHub. Nigerian developers interested in advanced functionality such as productivity metrics, customised AI responses based on private source code repositories, or integrations with Google Cloud services like BigQuery can also consider Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise.
