CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s alternative to GitHub Copilot

If GitHub Copilot was released the day before yesterday, Amazon today announced CodeWhisperera solution with the same purpose as GitHub’s, which also allows programmers to auto-complete entire functions with just a natural language comment or just start typing, thus substantially reducing the time developers will have to spend tinkering code.

CodeWhisperer, like Copilot, is based on artificial intelligenceand it has also been fed with millions of publicly accessible lines of code (surely both systems have coincided in more than one repository), to which Amazon’s own developments have also been added, in addition to multiple sets of documentation on programming.

Amazon CodeWhisperer currently supports Java, JavaScript, and Python and is currently available in preview as part of the AWS IDE Toolkit, which means developers can use it within their preferred IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and Amazon’s AWS Cloud 9. It is not yet supported by AWS Lambda, Amazon’s cloud platform console, but will be in the future.

In the CodeWhisperer presentation, Amazon wanted to clarify that this is not a response to Copilot, and that in fact they have been working on developments aimed at this end for quite a few years, such as CodeGuru and DevOps Guru. An interesting difference between CodeWhisperer and Copilot is that if Amazon’s system reproduces code similar to what it has already seen in its training, it will detect it and highlight the license of that original function, so that the programmer can decide whether or not to use it.

More information: TechCrunch