Last year, AWS announced a preview of Amazon CodeWhisperer, an AI coding tool to improve developer productivity, generating real-time code suggestions based on developer natural language feedback and previous code in their integrated development environment (IDE). He just launched a phto the commercial base of this competitor to Copilot, however, individual developers have free access via a simple email with an AWS Builder ID.
Trained on billions of lines of code, Codewhisperer can generate code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions, in real-time based on comments and existing code, improving developer productivity.
The generated code is adapted to the programmer’s style and naming conventions. The user can accept the suggestion, display more suggestions, or continue writing their own code. CodeWhisperer even provides suggestions for completing the comment itself.
During the review, AWS says that it launched a productivity challenge, “ and participants who used CodeWhisperer were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and 57% faster on average than those who did not use CodeWhisperer..
AWS announced general availability for 15 programming languages: “classic” Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript and C#, but also support for new languages: Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL and Scala .
CodeWhisperer is available from Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, CLion, GoLand, WebStorm, Rider, PhpStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, and DataGrip IDEs (when the appropriate AWS extensions for those IDEs are installed) or natively in AWS Cloud9 or the AWS Lambda console.
Built-in security analytics
Codewhisperer also includes up to 50 code scans (per user) per month. They scan Java, JavaScript, and Python projects for hard-to-find vulnerabilities, such as those in the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 or those that violate crypto library best practices or similar security. It analyzes existing code in the IDE (whether generated by CodeWhisperer or written by a developer), identifies problematic code, and makes suggestions for closing discovered security holes.
An open source benchmark tracker
CodeWhisperer includes a benchmark tracker that detects whether a code suggestion is similar to open source learning data. These suggestions are tagged with the open source project’s repository URL, file reference, and licensing information.
Paid version for professionals
AWS offers a professional tier that, in addition to the features offered in the individual tier, offers administrative features such as single sign-on and IAM identity center integration, policy management for referral code suggestions, and higher security scan limits (500 per month). Organizations are billed based on the number of users ($19 per user)