Take it, GitHub: AWS Launches Its AI Coding Assistant
There appears to be no area safe from Amazon, which will now compete with GitHub, the new AI coding assistant from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The new tool, called Amazon CodeWhisperer, provides developers with machine learning-based suggestions aimed at increasing productivity.
The new tool supports code written in Python, Java and JavaScript, and integrated development environments (IDEs) such as VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Webstorm and AWS Cloud9.
How does this work?
Amazon says that CodeWhisperer will continually check your code and your comments and present you with syntactically correct recommendations. The tech giant claims that the recommendations are synthesized based on your coding style and variable names and are “not just snippets”.
CodeWhisperer apparently uses a number of contextual clues to drive recommendations, including the cursor location in the source code, the code before the cursor, code in other files in the same project, and code.
Amazon says the tool was trained “on billions of lines of code” drawn from open-source repositories, internal Amazon repositories, API documentation, and forums.
Users are free to use the recommendations, or they can extend and customize them as needed.
Support for the AWS Lambda console is not currently on the menu, but should be available ‘very soon’ according to Amazon.
While this is probably welcome news for developers, it’s unlikely what GitHub is celebrating. The popular coding platform just announced that its own AI-powered coding assistant, CoPilot, has entered general availability.
Developers may need all the help they can to stay sane. A report by DigitalOcean found that nearly half (42%) are considering quitting their jobs or have already done so this year, calling out issues such as lack of time and resources to work on projects.