After nearly a year of free testing, Microsoft’s GitHub AI programming tool, Copilot, recently became available to all users. Anyone can use the tool for $10 per month or $100 per year. Today, Amazon immediately launched Copilot’s competing product at the re:Mars conference. Amazon calls it CodeWhisperer.
According to Amazon, CodeWhisperer is artificial intelligence (machine learning-based) code generation extension. It aims at improving the productivity of software developers.
CodeWhisperer will constantly check the developer’s code and provide syntactically correct suggestions. It synthesizes suggestions taking into consideration the developer’s coding style and variable names, rather than simple snippets.
CodeWhisperer Has A Number Of Advantages
Amazon said CodeWhisperer was trained on billions of lines of code in open source repositories, Amazon internal repositories, API documentation, and online forums. At the same time, Amazon promised not to use code written by developers to train its machine learning models during the preview period. As a reminder, one of its main rivals Copilot does the opposite.
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In terms of copyright issues, CodeWhisperer’s reference tracker detects whether code recommendations are likely to be similar to specific CodeWhisperer training data, and emphasizes the original license when generating snippets that are similar to existing snippets, putting the choice in the hands of developers as much as possible.
“CodeWhisperer provides security scans (for Java and Python) to help developers detect vulnerabilities in their projects and build applications responsibly. The service also includes a reference tracker that detects whether a code recommendation might be similar to particular training data. Developers can then easily find and review the code example and decide whether to use the code in their project. Additionally, CodeWhisperer empowers developers to avoid bias by removing code recommendations that might be considered biased and unfair.”
The preview version of CodeWhisperer is now available in VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, or AWS Cloud9. Also, currently, it supports Python, Java, and JavaScript. It is free during the preview period. And there is no information whether it will charge anything when going to the final version.
