Amazon Launches AI-powered CodeWhisperer Coding Tool
- By DSAITrends editors
- July 06, 2022
Another AI-powered tool designed to help programmers work faster has entered the fray. As announced by Amazon, CodeWhisperer is a coding companion powered by machine learning to help students, developers, and even experienced professional developers increase their coding productivity.
Trained on billions of lines of code
According to a blog post by AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, Amazon CodeWhisperer is trained on billions of lines of code from diverse sources that include open source repositories, internal Amazon sources, API documentation, and forums.
CodeWhisperer works with multiple IDEs and currently works with Python, Java, and JavaScript on Visual Studio Code and PyCharm IDEs, among others. Support for the AWS Lambda Console is in the works and should be ready “very soon”.
The tool relies on multiple contextual clues to drive recommendations, such as the code that precedes the cursor, comments, and even code in other files of the same project, says Barr.
“CodeWhisperer will continually examine your code and your comments and present you with syntactically correct recommendations. The recommendations are synthesized based on your coding style and variable names, and are not simply snippets,” he wrote.
To illustrate the capabilities of CodeWhisperer, Barr walked through an example in which a code comment “See if a number is prime” prompted CodeWhisperer to recommend a couple of function definitions. Once selected, CodeWhisperer followed up by recommending an entire block of Python code to determine if a given variable is a prime number.
A second example explored how CodeWhisperer can generate C code to access various AWS services using code comments. This raises the possibility of experienced developers using it to quickly learn new APIs or quickly access unfamiliar cloud services to significantly raise their productivity.
CodeWhisperer is currently in preview and requires a preview access code to activate. You can download the AWS IDE Toolkit here.
This announcement comes days after Microsoft’s GitHub announced that GitHub Copilot is now generally available to developers for a fee. A 60-day free trial is offered, after which it will cost USD10 per month per user, or USD100 if paid annually.
GitHub Copilot remains free for use by verified students and maintainers of popular open-source software.
Image credit: iStockphoto/monsitj