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Today, Amazon CodeWhisperer, a real-time AI coding companion, is generally available and also includes a CodeWhisperer Individual tier that’s free to use for all developers. Originally launched in preview last year, CodeWhisperer keeps developers in the zone and productive, helping them write code quickly and securely and without needing to break their flow by leaving their IDE to research something. Faced with creating code for complex and ever-changing environments, developers can improve their productivity and simplify their work by making use of CodeWhisperer inside their favorite IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and others. 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.
Using just an email account, you can sign up and, in just a few minutes, become more productive writing code—and you don’t even need to be an AWS customer. For business users, CodeWhisperer offers a Professional tier that adds administrative features, like SSO and IAM Identity Center integration, policy control for referenced code suggestions, and higher limits on security scanning. And in addition to generating code suggestions for Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, the generally available release also now supports Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala. CodeWhisperer is available to developers working in Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, CLion, GoLand, WebStorm, Rider, PhpStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, and DataGrip IDEs (when the appropriate AWS extensions for those IDEs are installed), or natively in AWS Cloud9 or AWS Lambda console.
Helping to keep developers in their flow is increasingly important as, facing increasing time pressure to get their work done, developers are often forced to break that flow to turn to an internet search, sites such as StackOverflow, or their colleagues for help in completing tasks. While this can help them obtain the starter code they need, it’s disruptive as they’ve had to leave their IDE environment to search or ask questions in a forum or find and ask a colleague—further adding to the disruption. Instead, CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE. 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.
Code generation from a comment
The code developers eventually locate may, however, contain issues such as hidden security vulnerabilities, be biased or unfair, or fail to handle open source responsibly. These issues won’t improve the developer’s productivity when they later have to resolve them. CodeWhisperer is the best coding companion when it comes to coding securely and using AI responsibly. To help you code responsibly, CodeWhisperer filters out code suggestions that might be considered biased or unfair, and it’s the only coding companion that can filter or flag code suggestions that may resemble particular open-source training data. It provides additional data for suggestions—for example, the repository URL and license—when code similar to training data is generated, helping lower the risk of using the code and enabling developers to reuse it with confidence.
Open-source reference tracking
CodeWhisperer is also the only AI coding companion to have security scanning for finding and suggesting remediations for hard-to-detect vulnerabilities, scanning both generated and developer-written code looking for vulnerabilities such as those in the top ten listed in the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). If it finds a vulnerability, CodeWhisperer provides suggestions to help remediate the issue.
Scanning for vulnerabilities
Code suggestions provided by CodeWhisperer are not specific to working with AWS. However, CodeWhisperer is optimized for the most-used AWS APIs, for example AWS Lambda, or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), making it the best coding companion for those building applications on AWS. While CodeWhisperer provides suggestions for general-purpose use cases across a variety of languages, the tuning performed using additional data on AWS APIs means you can be confident it is the highest quality, most accurate code generation you can get for working with AWS.
Meet Your new AI Code Companion Today
Amazon CodeWhisperer is generally available today to all developers—not just those with an AWS account or working with AWS—writing code in Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala. You can sign up with just an email address, and, as I mentioned at the top of this post, CodeWhisperer offers an Individual tier that’s freely available to all developers. More information on the Individual tier, and pricing for the Professional tier, can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/pricing.