News

Amazon AI-Assisted CodeWhisperer Now Free to Individual Developers

• By John K. Waters
• April 20, 2023

Amazon is making its CodeWhisperer AI-supported coding assistant available to individual developers for free in an apparent response to Microsoft's $10 per user per month fee for using GitHub's CoPilot. The tool, which offers coding suggestions is also available in a Professional edition, priced at $19 per user, per month.

The tool is available free to individuals who sign up with an AWS Builder ID. The Individual edition provides code recommendations, reference tracking, and security scans.

The Professional edition comes with enterprise administration capabilities. Administrators get organizational license management to centrally manage which developers in the organization should have access to CodeWhisperer, Amazon says. They also get organizational policy management to set service policies at the organizational level.

Launched in preview last year, 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," Amazon said in a statement.

The tool filters out code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair automatically, the company says, and flags any code that’s similar to open-source training data. It also comes with security scanning features that can identify vulnerabilities within a developer’s code, while providing suggestions to help close any security gaps it uncovers.

"CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE," VP of database, analytics, and machine learning services at AWS, Swami Sivasubramanian said. "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."

The tool was designed to work inside several popular IDEs, including Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA. And it supports several languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, including Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.