Amazon announces general availability of CodeWhisperer: What it means for Microsoft

Amazon on Thursday launched a free coding assistant, undercutting Microsoft's $10 per month service. After beta testing for over a year, CodeWhisperer is now live.

After launching it exclusively for AWS customers last year, the company launched CodeWhisperer, which developers can use within various integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt.

The AI bot automatically filters out any code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair 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 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, the company said in a statement.

The company further explained: "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."

Amazon CodeWhisperer is available to all developers writing code in Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.

This comes shortly after Microsoft-owned GitHub launched Co-pilot this year,  which is also an AI tool for developers but it's made free only for students. Other users have to pay $10. Meanwhile, Google too has its own coding tool, DeepMind's AlphaCode but it’s still in testing.