Google on Tuesday announced support for third-party tools in its enterprise AI code completion service, Gemini Code Assist.
Code Assist launched in April as a rebrand of a similar service that Google offered under the now-defunct Duet AI brand. Code Assist, available through plugins for popular development environments like VS Code and JetBrains, is powered by Google's Gemini AI model and can infer and modify large portions of your code.
With the addition of tools starting in private preview, Code Assist will be able to capture real-time data and access information from external applications. The idea, according to Google's director of product management Ryan Salva and group product manager Prithpal Bhogill, is to introduce different technologies into the coding environment while minimizing potential disruption.
“This new tool feature helps eliminate the friction of context switching,” Salva and Bhogill jointly wrote in a blog post. “Deploying scalable, secure applications into production requires more than just writing good code. Developers need solutions for productivity, observability, security, databases, and more. ”
Image credit: Google
Not everyone can build tools for Code Assist. Google is limiting the program to Google Cloud partners, at least for now.
“Tools allow developers to retrieve and act on information from any part of an engineering system, which is especially useful for services outside of the development environment,” Salva and Borgil wrote. I am writing. “For example, you can summarize recent comments from Jira issues, find the last person to merge changes to a file in git, or view the latest live site issues from Sentry.”
Code assist tools for GitLab, GitHub, Sentry.io, Atlassian Rovo, Snyk, and Google's own Google Docs will be available at launch. According to Salva and Bhogill, Google Cloud partners interested in creating new tools can contact their partner managers.
Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub's Copilot Enterprise, which offers extended functionality that is very similar to the Code Assist tool. But Google has long argued that Code Assist excels in other ways, such as supporting on-premises codebases.
Code Assist has made a number of upgrades this year, including improved code conversion capabilities and the launch of an Enterprise plan with customized code suggestions based on private code repositories.
Despite security, copyright, and reliability concerns about AI-powered assisted coding tools, developers are enthusiastic about them, with the majority of respondents in GitHub's latest survey reporting that they are using some form of of respondents say they are using AI tools. GitHub reported in April that Copilot has more than 1.8 million paid users and more than 50,000 enterprise customers.
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