Gemini Code Assist in Google Cloud

Rakesh Dhoopar, Director of Product Management at Google, presented Gemini Code Assist at Cloud Field Day 20, focusing on enhancing developer productivity and addressing common challenges in the coding world. He discussed how onboarding new developers can be slow due to the time required to get them up to speed on a project, and how excessive context switching and technical debt can further hinder productivity. Dhoopar emphasized the importance of reducing repetitive tasks and providing tools that assist in writing and maintaining code efficiently.

Dhoopar highlighted several capabilities of Gemini Code Assist, such as code generation and code completion. He explained the difference between these two features: code completion helps developers by predicting and finishing code as they type, while code generation allows developers to specify what they need in natural language, and the tool generates the entire code. He also mentioned the integration of Code Assist with Snyk for real-time vulnerability scanning, ensuring that the generated code is secure and complies with enterprise standards. Additionally, Gemini Code Assist can explain code in natural language and generate test plans and unit tests, significantly easing the developer’s burden.

The presentation also covered the technical aspects of Gemini Code Assist, including its ability to handle large context windows with up to one million tokens, which can represent a substantial portion of a codebase. This capability allows the tool to provide context-aware suggestions by analyzing the entire codebase, including local files, open tabs, and remote repositories. Dhoopar explained the importance of maintaining security and privacy by using mechanisms like Developer Connect and Cloud Build to manage and convert code into embeddings stored in alloyDB. This ensures that the actual code remains within the customer’s VPC, addressing security concerns while leveraging the power of large language models to enhance developer productivity.