Google Unveil Code Assists, a Tough Competition for GitHub’s Copilot

Google Held its Cloud Next Conference on 9th April 2024, where they cut the ribbon to a brand new technology named Gemini Code Assists. While every tech enthusiast is waiting for a tough fight between Google’s Code Assists and GitHub’s Copilot, many people are kneeling to the supremacy of Google.

Before jumping directly to the results, let’s first find out what Google Code Assists has to offer over GitHub’s Copilot and whether it is of any threat to the job of real-time app development entities.

Google Code Assists or Gemini Code Assist

The Code Assists by Google is the successor of a former similar service called Duet AI branding. Later was introduced by Google in 2023 which could not able to hold the users for very long, leading to bring into being Code Assists. Google Code Assists also known as Gemini Code Assists is all set to be available to the developers through plug-ins for different code editors like JetBrains and VS Code.

The New Update comes with the support for Gemini 1.5 Pro which has a million-token context windows. So, whether the developer wants to write the code or just edit it, Code Assists has more sources to get data and provide better outputs as compared to any of its present-time competitors. According to the available insights, Google Code Assists can also be fine-tuned, depending on the internal code base of a company.

Kai Du, Director of Engineering and Head of Generative AI at Turing said in his statement, “Code customization using RAG with Gemini Code Assists significantly increased the quality of Gemini’s assistance for our developers in terms of code completion and generation. With code customization in place, we are expecting a big increase in the overall code-acceptance rate.”

Brad Calder, Google’s VP and GM, at the same time, said, “This upgrade brings a massive 1 million-token context window, which is the largest in the industry. This allows customers to perform large-scale changes across your entire code base, enabling AI-assisted code transformations that were not possible before.”

To make the service even better, Google is all set to partner with developer-centric companies which will help them to bring more knowledge bases to Gemini. Under the same effort, the firm has already partnered with Stack Overflow and is also planning to partner with development giants like Elastic, Datastax, Datadog, Neo4j, Redis, Pinecone, Singlestore, HashiCorp, Pinecone, Redis, Snyk, and many more.

As per the promises by Google, developers will get great support from the technology where they can integrate their private codebases and repositories. It helps to generate customized code per the developers’ particular requirements. Code Assists also takes care of security as it offers single-tenancy and enterprise access control, equipped with an auditable access history that ensures the security of private code.

Long story short, Code Assists by Google comes out clean on its name as it enables developers to quickly write some commands and get neat and fully functional code in multiple languages. Furthermore, the new technology even allows the tester or developer to debug the long code a Code Assists has a strong capability of reading full code and bringing out all the errors that might be causing malfunctioning.

Code Assists Vs Mobile App Developers

The mass audience is confused about whether the new updates in Google’s Code Assists might take the job of app and software development companies in USA or if the human workforce still has a lot to offer over these AI technologies. So, the fact that Code Assists has streamlined a lot of tasks for the developers can never be denied. However, there is a long gap where platforms of these kinds can completely replace the development company and human workforce.

AI is currently able to streamline and fasten the repetitive tasks with more accuracy which saves a lot of human time. This time is meant to be invested in more innovative tasks that AI is currently unable to perform.

Software engineering is not just a job of writing codes but it needs understanding the science, critical thinking, creativity, expertise, and the capability to understand the expectations of customers. While the customer can provide half of the clear insight, another half part is meant to be understood by the developer to give the desired result.

Artificial Intelligence or software like Code Assists are far away from that understanding and ability to think like humans. Adhering to the above statements, it would be wrong to say that AI tools and platforms like Code Assists can replace software developers.