AWS Devs Can Access AI-Powered CodeWhisperer at No Cost -- AWSInsider

AWS Devs Can Access AI-Powered CodeWhisperer at No Cost

By John K. Waters
05/11/2023

Amazon Web Services has issued its answer to Microsoft's $10 per user per month fee for using GitHub Copilot.

AmazonCodeWhisperer, AWS's AI-supported coding assistant, is now available to individual developers for free if they have an AWS Builder ID. The free Individual edition provides code recommendations, reference tracking and security scans.

A Professional edition is also available for $19 per user per month and comes with enterprise administration capabilities. Administrators get organizational license management to centrally manage which developers in the organization should have access to CodeWhisperer, AWS says. They also get organizational policy management to set service policies at the organizational level.

Launched in preview last year, CodeWhisperer "helps with creating code for routine or time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks, working with unfamiliar APIs or SDKs, making correct and effective use of AWS APIs, and other common coding scenarios such as reading and writing files, image processing, writing unit tests, and lots more," Amazon said in a statement.

The tool filters out code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair automatically, the company says, and flags any code that’s similar to open-source training data. It also comes with security scanning features that can identify vulnerabilities within a developer’s code, while providing suggestions to help close any security gaps it uncovers.

"CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE," VP of database, analytics, and machine learning services at AWS, Swami Sivasubramanian said. "During the preview we ran a productivity challenge, and participants who used CodeWhisperer were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and did so an average of 57% faster than those who didn’t use CodeWhisperer."

The tool was designed to work inside several popular IDEs, including Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA. And it supports several languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, including Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at jwaters@converge360.com.