CodeWhisperer vs. Copilot: The Battle of AI Coding Assistants

Amazon has made its AI-powered coding assistant, CodeWhisperer, available for free to individual developers, directly competing with Microsoft’s rival tool that costs $10 per month. CodeWhisperer was initially launched as a preview last year, available only to Amazon Web Services customers. However, Amazon has now made it more accessible to developers by offering a free tier to everyone who signs up to use it.

Developers can use CodeWhisperer within various integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt. CodeWhisperer automatically filters out biased or unfair code suggestions, flags any code similar to open-source training data, and scans for security vulnerabilities. It supports several programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, and others such as Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.

Amazon’s CodeWhisperer tool is not the first AI coding assistant in the market. Microsoft-owned GitHub announced its Copilot AI tool in June last year, which offers similar coding suggestions from within an IDE. However, Microsoft only made the tool free for students and developers working on open-source projects, while all other users had to pay $10 per month for access or $100 per year. Google also has its own AI coding assistant called AlphaCode, which is still in testing.

Apart from CodeWhisperer, Amazon has also launched a new tool called Bedrock, which helps companies build and scale generative AI applications. Bedrock offers foundational models that developers can build upon, including Anthropic’s Claude, Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan, making it easier for third parties to create AI-powered tools that generate text, answer questions, create summaries, and more.

Amazon’s move to make CodeWhisperer free for individual developers is a significant step in making AI technology more accessible and affordable to a broader audience. As more AI coding assistants become available, it will be interesting to see how these tools evolve and how they will impact the software development industry.