Google has unveiled a new, free consumer version of its AI-powered code completion and assistance tool, known as Gemini Code Assist for Individuals, on Tuesday. Additionally, the company has introduced Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, a code review “agent” that automatically identifies bugs in code and provides suggestions directly within GitHub.

With Code Assist for Individuals, developers can engage in natural language conversations with a Google AI model using a chat window, which can access and edit their codebase. Similar to GitHub’s popular Copilot tool, Gemini Code Assist for Individuals can fix bugs, complete code sections, and explain unclear parts of the codebase.

The AI coding assistant utilizes a variant of Google’s Gemini 2.0 AI model, fine-tuned for coding applications. Code Assist for Individuals integrates with popular coding environments like VS Code and JetBrains via plugins and supports multiple programming languages.

Notably, Code Assist for Individuals offers a generous 180,000 code completions per month, which is 90 times the usage cap of the free GitHub Copilot plan. It also includes 240 chat requests daily, nearly five times the number of requests offered by the free GitHub Copilot plan.

The model powering Code Assist for Individuals boasts a 128,000-token context window, which Google claims is over four times larger than what competitors offer. This enables the model to process more code in a single prompt, allowing it to reason over complex codebases.

Developers can sign up for the free public preview of Gemini Code Assist for Individuals starting Tuesday.

Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, on the other hand, automatically scans pull requests to identify bugs and provides additional recommendations.

The launch of these tools comes as Google intensifies its efforts to compete with Microsoft and its subsidiary GitHub in the developer tools space. Seven months ago, Google hired Ryan Salva, former leader of the GitHub Copilot team, to head its developer tooling efforts.

By offering a free AI coding assistant with high usage caps, Google aims to attract developers early in their careers to Code Assist, according to Salva. He expects some of these developers to eventually upgrade to an enterprise Code Assist plan, which is where Google will generate revenue.

Google has been selling Gemini Code Assist to businesses for approximately a year. In December, the company announced that the AI coding assistant would soon integrate with third-party tools from GitLab, GitHub, and Google Docs. Enterprise Code Assist tiers offer additional features like audit logs, integration with other Google Cloud products, and customization for private repositories.