Gemini Code Assist will be shut down on July 17 | Hacker News Reader

Gemini Code Assist will be shut down on July 17

docs.cloud.google.com

64 pointsushakov51 comments

Googles AI stuff and tiers are probably the most confusing ever because it feels like they rename it all the time. If you subscribe by the time you pay, it has a different name again and the documentation and blogs are all over the place they basically now call everything Google One. It's like all the appliance manufacturers where every store has a different id for the same machine.

The other problem is the pricing includes a bunch of other Google crap I have zero interest in. They're doing the same mistake Microsoft is doing. People like me want only the coding subscription, not everything else that's shoved into it. When I buy into Claude, I am into it for Claude Code, if I cared to give Scam Altman any money it would be for Codex.

name calling detracts from your credibility instead of supporting your point

That's by design. It's like asking cable companies to only have this or that channel, or netflix to let you pay just for standup comedy specials. The bundle is the bundle, the hits subsidize the misses.

Oof, why would you sign up for only the standup comedy specials? 90% of them are garbage. These people are not funny.

That 10% might be worth $1 or $2 per month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Did you expect comedy specials to be an exception to this?

In theory they are standardizing on Antigravity now, for all of the agentic/dev stuff.

I think the title is wrong, it's "Gemini Code Assist on GitHub" for non-enterprise users that is being shut down. Not "Gemini Code Assist". Yes their naming scheme is absurd

Note also:

> Unpaid tier (Gemini Code Assist for individuals) and Google One users only: Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions will be replaced by Antigravity CLI and Antigravity on June 18th. Please migrate to avoid disruption. Learn more here.

https://codeassist.google/products/business https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...

What the doublespeak hell is this?

> The enterprise version of Gemini Code Assist on GitHub is a separate and distinct product from Gemini Code Assist Enterprise.

A while back I evaluated using Google's AI products for my company and this is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to confusing naming. I left so confused after a few days that I decided there was no way I could inflict that on anyone else in the company. I think the were some good ideas in there but I couldn't tell you which of the ~40 (at least) similarly named products those were.

I did wind up choosing GCP to be our primary enterprise AI provider and it has definitely been a challenge to try and explain the difference between Vertex AI Studio, Gemini Enterprise, and Gemini Enterprise Code Assist, to say nothing of trying to explain that these three products are not the same thing as the consumer version of Gemini that they can find when they google “Gemini AI”. The branding is godawful.

This appears to be a commonality across software companies as Microsoft appear to do the same thing.

Is it that the marketing is bad or is there some weird reason that this all makes sense?

If I had to guess, it’s an ownership issue. There’s an enterprise team, a consumer team, a cloud team, etc. so there’s no single vision and plan. Which could be okay, but then each of those teams likely has not been given the authority to develop their own branding or naming and just defaults to using whatever is available, pre-canned.

Honestly I think it’s just a Microsoft and Google problem. Microsoft has been terrible at branding for as long as I can remember, and Google seems like they’ve been slowly turning into Microsoft over the years in more ways than just poor product naming.

don't forget the renaming of Vertex AI to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

so you could have e.g. Claude Opus 4.8 on Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

makes sense, right?

Price segmentation taken to absurd lengths.

It looks like products being developed by two teams, separate but not independent what can be chosen as the name of service.

Hah, is Google now just as bad at naming things as Microsoft?

Not quite, I don't see a "Special edition, with offers, without teams" branding on the end of it.

I wonder if I can ask a Google sales rep for quote me a price for Gemini One 365 Enterprise Pro.

But I guess they'd just put my query into their Gemini Sales Pro Assist chatbot..

I'm forever shocked at how marketing illiterate this huge multi-billion $ conglomerate is. I guess when you're Google you don't need to be.

Highly recommend exerting the extra effort it takes to remain portable with your AI workflow. Not just to workaround typical Google shut downs, but also the incoming price hikes.

the more portable everyone is, the more arbitrage will happen - cheap providers will raise prices too because users will flow to them

This is not a theory of market competition that I've heard before.

It’s also an usual use of the term arbitrage

you will not want 20 different accounts at 20 providers, you'll have one at a "token arbitrage" provider - OpenRouter

drop-shipping is a form of arbitrage

basic supply/demand

demand moves to cheaper providers, they ran out of capacity and increase price

literally why "commodities" are "commodities" - the more interchangeable a product is the more exposed it is to supply/demand mechanics

Agree. The less "stuck" a customer is to a given provider, the more that prices should equalize between providers.

highly agree, i built typed for this exactly.

All I use is the web app/chat features for development, so I feel like my bases are covered.

URL should probably be: [Sunset of the Consumer version of Gemini Code Assist on GitHub](https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/deprec...)

Code Assist isn't being shut down (despite the editatorialized title), they're just not giving it away for free anymore.

That's one way to frame it. For those who adopted Code Assist and made it part of their process, it's at best a technicality, at worst extortion.

> Important: The enterprise version of Gemini Code Assist on GitHub is a separate and distinct product from Gemini Code Assist Enterprise.

Ah yes, the famous clarity with Google product naming. Nearly as good as Microsoft's naming.

Came here to say this. I have no idea what these products are supposed to be. Very much "Windows Github Copilot Home", "Github Enterprise Office 365", "Docs Gemini Assist One", "Windows Copilot Pro Educational"

Azure %product% With CoPilot for Workgroups 365 Enterprise Edition

It was good while it lasted, genuinely and consistently finding errors. I migrated to https://github.com/zeflq/pi-reviewer so I can be in control. There are commercial alternatives, of course.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

If google ever fails it will be because they are fundamentally bad at product management.

Their product is ads slots and data, which they seem to be brilliant at. Everything else is a funnel to feed the ads, and the funnels change like wvery other marketing funnel.

Thank you Google, you are one of the last remaining companies we can depend on behaving consistently! Please never change! ;-)

Who's making the PR?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

This is separate from https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/pull/1694 right?

This is exactly the kind of risk I try to flag when reviewing AI tools for non-technical solopreneurs — a tool being genuinely good today says nothing about whether it'll still exist in 6 months. I've started weighting "how painful is it if this disappears" almost as heavily as the feature set itself, because the people I write for don't have the bandwidth to migrate on short notice if something like this happens. Was anyone here building a real workflow around Code Assist specifically, or was it more of a nice-to-have layered on top of something else?

Most of these free AI coding tool/agents won't exist anymore by 2028. This LLM thing is so expensive to run, it's understandable that these corporations are moving to the monetization phase.

What solopreneurs also need to worry about is that the cost for these tools is likely to increase... exponentially, because even paid, the plans are still heavily subsidized... when the profit seeking phase kicks in, some people indeed will be there for a rude awakening...

I personally do not to rely heavily on these tools for my projects, because I know what's going to happen.

anthropic has 80% margin on API tokens

Let's wait for the S1 before making any assumptions.

Shut down the whole thing.

Why?

People are afraid for the singularity. Can't blame them, hollywood has been milking that hypothesis for decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com