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 an identical service that Google offered under its now-defunct Duet AI branding. Available via plugins for popular development environments resembling VS Code and JetBrains, Code Assist is predicated on Google's Gemini AI models, allowing it to rethink and modify large blocks of code.
By adding tools that launch in private preview, Code Assist can get real-time data and access information from external applications. The idea is to integrate different technologies into the coding environment while minimizing potential distractions, said Google product management director Ryan Salva and group product manager Prithpal Bhogill.
“This recent tool feature might help remove the friction of context switching,” Salva and Bhogill wrote together in a blog post. “Bringing scalable, secure applications into production requires greater than just writing great code – developers need solutions for productivity, observability, security, databases, and more.”
Not everyone can create a tool for Code Assist. Google limits this system to Google Cloud Partnernot less than for now.
“Tools enable developers to retrieve or act on information from any a part of their engineering system – which is especially useful for services outside the developer environment,” Salva and Bhogill write. “For example, you possibly can summarize recent comments on a Jira issue, find the last person to merge changes to a file in Git, or view the newest live site issue from Sentry.”
Code Assist tools from GitLab, GitHub, Sentry.io, Atlassian Rovo, Snyk and Google's own Google Docs can be found at launch. Google Cloud partners fascinated about developing recent tools can contact their partner managers, Salva and Bhogill say.
Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub's Copilot Enterprise, which offers extensions that work similarly to Code Assist tools. But Google has long claimed that Code Assist excels in other ways, too, resembling its support for codebases running on-premise.
Code Assist has undergone plenty of upgrades this yr, including improved code transformation capabilities and the introduction of an enterprise plan with custom code suggestions based on private code repositories.
Despite the safety, copyright, and reliability concerns related to AI-powered assistive coding tools, developers have shown enthusiasm for them overwhelming majority of respondents to the newest GitHub survey said they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. GitHub reported in April that Copilot had done this over 1.8 million paying users and greater than 50,000 business customers.
