Did they get GitHub Copilot to write it?
Amazon at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Thursday announced a preview of an automated programming assistance tool called CodeWhisperer. Available to those who have obtained an invitation through the AWS IDE Toolkit, a plugin for code editors to assist with writing AWS applications, CodeWhisperer is Amazon’s answer to GitHub Copilot, an AI (machine learning-based) code generation extension that entered general availability earlier this week. In a blog post, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, said the goal of CodeWhisperer is to make software developers more productive.
“CodeWhisperer will continually examine your code and your comments, and present you with syntactically correct recommendations”, said Barr. “The recommendations are synthesized based on your coding style and variable names, and are not simply snippets.”
The service is free during the preview period, as was Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, now priced at $10 per month. Barr said CodeWhisperer analyzes various signals to suggest appropriate bits of code, including cursor location, preceding code, comments, and code in other project files. The software, he said, is trained on billions of lines of code in open-source repositories, internal Amazon repos, API docs, and online forums.
