Gemini Code Assist overview

Gemini Code Assist, which is part of Gemini for Google Cloud, offers AI-powered assistance to help your development team build, deploy, and operate applications throughout the software development lifecycle.

You can use Gemini Code Assist in your IDE (such as VS Code, IntelliJ, Cloud Workstations, or Cloud Shell Editor) for AI-powered coding assistance in many popular languages. You can get code completions as you write your code, generate full functions or code blocks from comments, generate unit tests, and get help with debugging, understanding, and documenting your code.

Gemini Code Assist provides contextualized responses to your prompts, including source citations regarding which documentation and code samples Gemini used to generate its responses.

Gemini Code Assist uses large language models (LLMs) that are developed by Google. The LLMs are fine-tuned with billions of lines of open source code, security data, and Google Cloud-specific content such as documentation and sample code.

Gemini doesn't use your prompts or its responses as data to train its models. For more information, see How Gemini for Google Cloud uses your data. As an early-stage technology, Gemini can generate output that seems plausible but is factually incorrect. We recommend that you validate all output from Gemini before you use it. For more information, see Gemini for Google Cloud and responsible AI.

How Gemini helps with coding

Gemini provides assistance with coding and code-related tasks. We recommend that you test and review all code. Gemini provides citation information when it directly quotes at length from another source, such as existing open source code. For more information, see How and when Gemini cites sources.

Interact with Gemini Code Assist in your IDE

After you set up Gemini Code Assist for a Google Cloud project, and install the Cloud Code plugin in your IDE, you can ask for assistance in the following ways:

  • Receive code completions or generate code directly in the code editor.

  • Click spark Gemini in the IDE to display the conversational assistant. You can ask questions or select code in your editor and enter prompts such as the following:

    • Write unit tests for my code.
    • Help me debug my code.
    • Make my code more readable.

For more information, see Use Gemini Code Assist in your IDE.

Features

The following table shows the types of generative AI assistance that are available in Gemini Code Assist, along with links to documentation that shows you how to get assistance:

Task Type of assistance Product documentation
Develop and deploy
  • Generate and debug code.
  • Generate unit tests.
  • Answer questions about code and other technical topics.
  • Offer suggestions for best practices and optimization.
Code Transformations (Preview)
  • Generate comment lines to document your code.
  • Troubleshoot code with issues.
  • Improve code readability.
  • Make code more efficient.

What's next