Gemini Code Assist tools target developer productivity from within IDEs

Google has launched new Gemini Code Assist tools that are designed to help developers improve their productivity from within an integrated development environment (IDE), such as Visual Studio Code or JetBrains.

“These tools are all about developer productivity by enabling them to stay in their coding interface (IDE) of choice while accessing related information from other applications or tools,” said Kathy Lange, research director at IDC.

Expanding further, Moor Strategy and Insights principal analyst, Jason Andersen, said that the launch of these tools is in sync with the industry trend of evolution of IDEs in general.

“Google and others are starting to stretch the boundaries of what an IDE is and how much a developer can achieve within the tool,” Andersen explained, adding that rivals products, such as Amazon Q Developer, GitHub Copilot, and IBM Watsonx Code Assistant, either already have similar tools.

Lange pointed out that the addition of these tools may be a strategy to increase the stickiness of Code Assist.

“Every vendor wants developers to choose their platform for application development and create the AI ecosystem that keeps them there, making their platform sticky and driving more revenue. It also ends up attracting end-user customers to their platform,” Lange explained.

What exactly are these tools?

The Code Assist tools launched Tuesday are designed to help developers retrieve information from — or act on any part of their — engineering system, which is helpful for services outside their IDE, the company said.

“For instance, the tools could be used by developers to 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,” Google explained in a blog post.

Partnerships or tools in the initial release include support for GitLab, GitHub, Google Docs, Sentry.io, Atlassian (Rovo), and Snyk.

These tools work via an API and are able to translate any natural language command into a parametrized API call as defined by the OpenAPI standard or YAML file the user provides.

Other use cases could include real-time access to data and insights from integrated partner tools so that developers can make informed decisions faster, in turn accelerating the development lifecycle.

Further, Google said that it is collaborating with partners, such as Dynatrace, New Relic, SonarQube, and Black Duck to improve observability and security in the software development lifecycle.

However, this is not the first that Google is relying on partners to expand Gemini Code Assist’s capabilities.

When Google renamed Duet AI for Developers to Gemini Code Assist back in April, it had added a host of partners, such as Synk, Elastic, Datadog, Datastax, HashiCorp, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, Singlestore, and StackOverflow, to provide the Gemini model with more data and knowledge from each of these companies to help generate more accurate code. Earlier this month, the cloud services provider updated the large language model by replacing Gemini 1.5 Pro and underpinning Code Assist with Gemini 2.0 Flash — a model that it claims provides better quality responses and lower latency.