At the Cloud Next conference, a company representative announced that the AI coding assistant Code Assist can now deploy new AI agents. They can create apps from product specifications in Google Docs or perform code conversions from one language to another. Code Assist is now available in Android Studio, in addition to other programming environments.
Image source: Google
The Code Assist updates are a response to competitive pressure from companies like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Cognition Labs, the creator of the viral Devin programming tool. The AI-powered coding assistant market is growing every month and is worth billions of dollars.
Code Assist agents, which can be managed from the new Gemini Code Assist Kanban board, can create work plans and report step-by-step progress on work requests. In addition to building software and migrating code, agents can implement new application features, perform code reviews, and generate unit tests and documentation.
It’s hard to know how well Code Assist’s agents work. Research has shown that even the best AI-powered code generators to date can make mistakes and introduce security vulnerabilities due to their inability to understand programming logic. In one recent test, Devin only successfully completed three out of twenty tasks.
Therefore, when using any AI assistant for programming, it does not hurt to check the resulting code yourself.