Amazon will make its AI-powered coding assistant available for free to individual developers. This is in contrast to its $10 per month pricing. In a post, Amazon announced that CodeWhisperer is now available for all who sign up to use it .
Amazon released CodeWhisperer last year as a preview. It is a tool that developers can use in various integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code to generate lines of code based upon a prompt. Although it was initially only available to Amazon Web Services customers (but the new free tier will make it more accessible to all developers).
CodeWhisperer automatically removes code suggestions that could be biased or unfair. It also flags code that is similar to open-source training data. It has security scanning capabilities that allow you to identify security flaws in your code and offer suggestions on how to close them. CodeWhisperer supports many languages, including Python and Java, JavaScript and TypeScript. It also supports C#, which includes Go, Rust and PHP.
Microsoft-owned GitHub beat Amazon with its Copilot AI tool. It was announced in June last year. The coding assistant generates code and suggests code within an IDE. However, Microsoft restricted access to students and developers who work on open-source projects. All other users had to pay $10 per monthly or $100 per calendar year. DeepMind also has an AlphaCode tool, but this is still under development.
This isn’t all the AI news Amazon has announced. It also launched Bedrock which assists companies in building and scaling generative AI applications. Developers can use a variety foundational models (FMs), including Anthropic’s Claude, Stable Diffusion and Amazon Titan. Third parties should be able to develop AI-powered tools that can generate text, answer questions and create summaries.
However, the code that developers find may contain hidden security vulnerabilities, bias or unfair issues, or not handle open-source responsibly. These issues will not improve the developer’s productivity if they are later resolved. CodeWhisperer is the best code companion for coding securely and responsibly using AI. CodeWhisperer helps you code responsibly by filtering out code suggestions that could be considered unfair or biased. It’s also the only coding companion capable of flagging code suggestions that may look like open-source training data. Additional data such as the URL of the repository and the license are available for suggestions. This helps to lower the risk and allows developers to reuse the code with confidence.
CodeWhisperer is the only AI coding companion that has security scanning. This scans both developer-written and generated code to find vulnerabilities. It also suggests remediations. CodeWhisperer will offer suggestions to fix any vulnerabilities it finds.
CodeWhisperer does not provide code suggestions that are specific to AWS. CodeWhisperer can be used to create AWS-specific applications. It is optimized for the most popular AWS APIs, such as AWS Lambda or Amazon Simple Storage Service. CodeWhisperer offers suggestions for general-purpose uses across a range of languages. However, it also includes tuning using additional data from AWS APIs. This means that you can be sure that you are getting the best code generation for AWS.
