Google on Tuesday announced support for third-party tools in Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion service.
Code Assist launched in April as a rebrand of a similar service Google offered under its now-defunct Duet AI branding. Available through plug-ins for popular dev environments like VS Code and JetBrains, Code Assist is powered by Google’s Gemini AI models, which allow it to reason over and change large chunks of code.
With the addition of tools, which are launching in private preview, Code Assist can pull in real-time data and access info from outside applications. The idea is to bring various technologies into the coding environment while minimizing potential distractions, said Google director of product management Ryan Salva and group product manager Prithpal Bhogill.
“This new tools feature can help eliminate the friction of context switching,” Salva and Bhogill jointly wrote in a blog post. “Getting scalable, secure applications into production requires more than just writing great code — developers need solutions for productivity, observability, security, databases, and more.”
Not just anyone can build a tool for Code Assist. Google is limiting the program to Google Cloud partners, at least for now.
“Tools enable developers to retrieve information from, or act on, any part of their engineering system — which is especially helpful for services outside the developer environment,” Salva and Bhogill wrote. “For example, you might summarize recent comments from a Jira issue, find the last person who merged changes to a file in git, or show the most recent live site issue from Sentry.”
Code Assist tools from GitLab, GitHub, Sentry.io, Atlassian Rovo, Snyk, and Google’s own Google Docs are available at launch. Google Cloud partners interested in creating new tools can reach out to their partner managers, Salva and Bhogill say.
Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise, which offers extensions that work a lot like Code Assist tools. But Google has long asserted that Code Assist stands out in other ways, for example in its support for codebases that sit on-premises.
Code Assist has seen a number of upgrades this year, including enhanced code transformation capabilities and the launch of an enterprise plan with customized code suggestions based on private code repositories.
Despite the security, copyright, and reliability concerns around AI-powered assistive coding tools, developers have shown enthusiasm for them, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. GitHub reported in April that Copilot had over 1.8 million paying users and more than 50,000 business customers.
