Amazon has made waves in the coding community by unveiling a free, AI-powered coding assistant for individual developers called CodeWhisperer.
This move puts Amazon in direct competition with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot X, which charges $10 monthly for access to its tool. The announcement by Amazon is a significant advancement in the world of coding since CodeWhisperer is now open to anybody who joins up, making it more accessible to coders who do not utilise Amazon Web Services (AWS).
CodeWhisperer was initially announced as a preview last year and allowed developers to generate lines of code based on text-based prompts within various integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Visual Studio Code. The tool filters potentially biased or unfair code suggestions and flags code similar to open-source training data. Additionally, it includes security scanning capabilities to identify vulnerabilities in developers’ code and provide suggestions for resolving any security gaps.
Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripts, SQL, and Scala are among the programming languages currently supported by CodeWhisperer. Because of the wide variety of language support, it is accessible to many developers.
Microsoft-owned GitHub had previously taken the lead in AI coding tools, announcing its AI tool Copilot last June. However, the tool was free only for students and developers working on popular open-source projects. Access to everyone else required $10 a month or $100 a year. Amazon’s CodeWhisperer is now free, which might be a game changer for developers searching for AI-powered coding assistance without breaking the bank.
In addition to CodeWhisperer, Amazon announced a new service called Bedrock that helps customers build and scale generative AI apps. Amazon Bedrock comes with various foundational models (FMs), such as Anthropic’s Claude, Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan, which developers can build on to create AI-powered tools that generate text, answer questions, create summaries, and more.
The availability of CodeWhisperer to a wider audience is likely to make AI-powered coding assistance more accessible to a greater number of developers. The addition of the Bedrock service will also help third parties create AI-powered tools, which could lead to a new era of innovative AI-powered apps and services.
