AWS has made CodeWhisperer, its AI coding assistant, widely available. CodeWhisperer, the company’s answer to GitHub CoPilot, has been in beta since June 2022. Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C# were supported in the preview, and the full release now includes Go, Kotlin, Rust, PHP, SQL, C, C++, Scala, and shell scripting. VS Code, JetBrains IDEs based on IntelliJ IDEA, AWS Cloud9, and the AWS Lambda console are the only IDEs supported.
Security scanning and AI coding support are both included in CodeWhisperer. For a limited number of security scans per month, it will scan for vulnerabilities classified as among the top ten by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and offer remediation.
CodeWhisperer is free for individual developers, in contrast to CoPilot. The professional tier is additionally available for $19 per user per month. The paid-for option offers policy management support in addition to a 50 to 500 scan increase in the monthly allotment for code security scans. The number of inference requests is not constrained by any plan.
AWS is trailing in this race, but along with its free offer, it can claim another advantage over its competitor that is unique to AWS services. As stated in the CodeWhisperer FAQs, “The code suggestions provided by CodeWhisperer are based on large language models (LLMs) trained on billions of lines of code, including Amazon and open-source code,” indicating that the cloud computing behemoth has permitted the inclusion of its own code in the training data. Therefore, when writing code specifically for AWS services, CodeWhisperer is probably going to perform well, which is an important aspect.
CodeWhisperer, like CoPilot, may occasionally copy code from works covered by an open source license. According to the above-mentioned FAQs, “if CodeWhisperer detects that its output matches particular open-source training data, the built-in reference tracker will notify you with a reference to the license type and a URL for the open-source project.”
Conclusion:
People are concerned that AI coding tools will soon replace developers; but, in my opinion, this is not the case, at least not anytime soon. Coding companions are simply that: companions. I don’t see how these types of tools will ever be able to replace developers in any meaningful way. However, I believe these tools have a place in providing more rapid methods to integrate with APIs and reuse common programming patterns.
0 Comments