Free CodeWhisperer giveaway to individual developers

© Amazon Web Services.

Amazon is making its CodeWhisperer coding assistant free for individual developers, most likely to compete with its Microsoft rival, Copilot AI. The company launched a preview of its AI-based tool last year. As with Copilot, developers can use the assistant in different integrated development environments (IDE) such as Visual Studio Code to write lines of code from a text prompt. While it was originally available only to Amazon Web Services customers, its new free version should make it much more accessible to developers who are not AWS customers. CodeWhisperer supports a wide range of languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL and Scala. What’s more, DeepMind (affiliated with Alphabet/Google) also has its proprietary tool, AlphaCode, but it’s still in the test phase. 

Amazon is also releasing Bedrock, a tool that will help companies create and scale up generative-AI applications. It comes with a series of foundational models (FM) such as Anthropic’s Claude, Stable Diffusion and Amazon Titan, that developers can build on to more easily create services that generate text, answer queries, and write summaries.

⇨ The Verge, Benj Edwards, “Generative AI comes to Amazon Web Services.”

⇨ The Verge, Emma Roth, “Amazon offers free access to its AI coding assistant to undercut Microsoft.”

2023-04-13