Amazon's AI-powered CodeWhisperer tool now free for all developers

Amazon makes its AI-powered CodeWhisperer tool free for individual developers

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Apr 14, 2023, 10:21 AM EDT

In a move to undercut its competitors, Amazon has made its AI-powered coding assistant, CodeWhisperer, available for free to individual developers. The tool generates lines of code based on a text-based prompt within various integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Visual Studio Code. Originally available only to Amazon Web Services customers, the newly announced free tier will make it more accessible to developers who don’t use AWS.

CodeWhisperer has several features that set it apart from its competitors. The tool automatically filters out any code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair, and flags any code that’s similar to open-source training data.

CodeWhisperer can flag or filter code suggestions that resemble open-source training data. Get the associated open-source project’s repository URL and license so that you can more easily review them and add attribution. (Courtesy of Amazon Web Services)

It also includes security scanning features that identify vulnerabilities within a developer’s code and provides suggestions to close any security gaps it uncovers.

The built-in security scans your code to detect hard-to-find vulnerabilities and get code suggestions to remediate them immediately. (Courtesy of Amazon Web Services)

The coding assistant supports several languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#. It also supports Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala. CodeWhisperer is not the first coding assistant to hit the market. In June of last year, Microsoft-owned GitHub announced its Copilot AI tool. However, while Copilot is free for students and developers working on open-source projects, other users must pay $10 per month or $100 per year.

Google‘s DeepMind also has its AlphaCode tool, but it is still in testing. CodeWhisperer’s unique features and accessibility to individual developers could give it an edge over its competitors.

In addition to CodeWhisperer, Amazon has launched Bedrock, which helps companies build and scale generative AI apps. Bedrock comes with a variety of foundational models (FMs) that developers can build upon, including Anthropic’s Claude, Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan. Third-party developers can use these FMs to create AI-powered tools that generate text, answer questions, create summaries, and more.