Amazon CodeWhisperer is Now Available in Public Preview

AWS (Amazon Web Services)

At its past re:MARS conference last week, Amazon announced that Amazon CodeWhisperer is now available in preview. Amazon CodeWhisperer is a code development tool that uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to help developers write better code and reduce routine and repetitive work.

Thinking back to my early developer days, I remember how much I loved the Visual Studio IntelliSense feature that provided help with syntax, data types, and object references. Amazon CodeWhisperer takes this same idea several steps further by incorporating machine learning models that have been trained with billions of lines of code.

CodeWhisperer can also help developers to write code that accesses various AWS services, and the company promises that this new tool should get better over time. “We trained (and continue to train) CodeWhisperer on billions of lines of code drawn from open source repositories, internal Amazon repositories, API documentation, and forums,” said Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services.

How Amazon CodeWhisperer works

Amazon CodeWhisperer can accelerate the development process in several key ways. First, developers can simply write comments in their IDE’s code editor, and CodeWhisperer will automatically analyze them and determine which cloud services and public libraries are best suited to perform specified tasks. CodeWhisperer then recommends a code snippet and puts it directly in the source code editor.

Next, Amazon CodeWhisperer provides security scans for Java and Python code to help developers detect vulnerabilities and create more secure applications. It also includes a reference tracker that detects whether a code recommendation might be similar to particular training data. Developers can then find and review the code example and decide whether to include it in their project.

“CodeWhisperer uses multiple contextual clues to drive recommendations including the cursor location in the source code, code that precedes the cursor, comments, and code in other files in the same projects. You can use the recommendations as-is, or you can enhance and customize them as needed,” Barr explained.

Amazon CodeWhisperer can examine your comments and recommend the function body.

How to join the Amazon CodeWhisperer preview

Amazon CodeWhisperer is available in public preview with support for multiple IDEs and languages. CodeWhisperer is currently available for the Java, JavaScript, and Python programming languages. The service integrates with multiple IDEs including JetBrains (IntelliJ, PyCharm, and WebStorm), Visual Studio Code, AWS Cloud9, and the AWS Lambda console.

During the preview period, developers can use CodeWhisperer at no cost. You can sign up for the waitlist at the CodeWhisperer sign-up page. For more information, you can check out the Amazon CodeWhisperer product page on the AWS website.