Are developers getting lazy? Is there a conspiracy to replace us all with AI-based code generators? Probably not, but it’s easy to suspect so with the apparent onslaught of AI/ML coding assistants from the world’s tech giants.
The latest addition to the growing list of AI coding assistants is Amazon CodeWhisperer. Amazon defines CodeWhisperer as an “ML-powered coding companion.” Sounds familiar? It might be because Github calls Copilot an “AI pair programmer” – essentially the same thing.
It’s clear why Amazon chose to release its alternative to Copilot. Github’s code completion tool made waves across the developer community with impressive adoption rates. Then, only days after Microsoft put a price tag on Copilot, Amazon announced it would be releasing a preview version of CodeWhisperer for IDEs that support the AWS Toolkit.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Vasi Philomin, Amazon’s VP in charge of AI services, emphasized that the company didn’t create CodeWhisperer to compete with Github’s Copilot. According to Amazon, CodeGuru (Amazon’s AI code reviewer and performance profiler) and DevOps Guru (a tool for finding operation issues), the company laid the groundwork for CodeWhisperer’s launch years ago.
For heavy AWS users, CodeWhisperer may seem like a logical AI/ML coding assistant choice. After all, it comes installed with the AWS Toolkit, and the waiting list can’t be long. But is CodeWhisperer worth trying out if you’re not looking for AWS-specific suggestions in your code? And how does it compare to more established code completion and suggestion tools?
Amazon CodeWhisperer is, according to the official description, a “machine learning (ML)–powered service that aims to improve developer productivity by generating code recommendations based on their comments in natural language and code in the integrated development environment (IDE).” Announced in June 2022, CodeWhisperer is available only upon request to users who apply for the preview period.
At the time of writing, CodeWhisperer supports code suggestions for Java, Python, and JavaScript projects only. It is installed as part of the AWS Toolkit and will work on popular IDEs, including JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio Code, and, of course, AWS Cloud9.
According to Amazon, they train CodeWhisperer on “billions of lines of code drawn from open source repositories, internal Amazon repositories, API documentation, and forums.” Then, you can use CodeWhisperer in your IDE to get recommendations based on previous code lines or comments.
Tabnine is the AI coding assistant that helps development teams of every size use AI to accelerate and simplify the software development process without sacrificing privacy, security, or compliance. Tabnine boosts engineering velocity, code quality, and developer happiness by automating the coding workflow through AI tools customized to your team. Tabnine supports more than one million developers across companies in every industry.
Unlike generic coding assistants, Tabnine is the AI that you control:
It’s private. You choose where and how to deploy Tabnine (SaaS, VPC, or on-premises) to maximize control over your intellectual property. Rest easy knowing that Tabnine never stores or shares your company’s code.
It’s personalized. Tabnine delivers an optimized experience for each development team. It’s context-aware and delivers precise and personalized recommendations for code generation, code explanations, guidance, and for test and documentation generation.
It’s protected. Tabnine is built with enterprise-grade security and compliance at its core. It’s trained exclusively on open source code with permissive licenses, ensuring that customers are never exposed to legal liability.
Tabnine provides accurate and personalized code completions for code snippets, whole lines, and full functions. Tabnine Chat in the IDE allows developers to communicate with a chat agent in natural language and get assistance with various coding tasks, such as:
Learn more about using Tabnine AI to analyze, create, and improve your code across every stage of development:
Try Tabnine for free today or contact us to learn how we can help accelerate your software development.
Pricing:
Free account (enabling short code completion)
Pro account: starting at $12/month per user (There is a 90-day free trial available)
Enterprise account: pricing is available on quote.
GitHub Copilot uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and whole functions for popular code editors like Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs. In terms of languages, Copilot offers support for languages like Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.
Copilot’s somewhat bumpy launch into the world brought positive competition like CodeWhisperer and a lot more attention to the abilities of proven software development AI solutions.
Pricing:
$10/month or $100/year (free trial available).
Amazon CodeWhisperer draws more from Captain Stack than Copilot, even though Github’s service inspired Captain Stack.
Captain Stack is a code suggestion tool that uses Google instead of AI. It sends your search query to Google, retrieves StackOverflow and Github Gist answers, and auto-completes them. Available for VSCode alone, Captain Stack is more of a shortcut to Google in your IDE than an intelligent code completion tool.
Pricing: Free
Another open-source plugin for VSCode that Copilot inspired is GTP-Code-Clippy.
GPT-Code-Clippy (GPT-CC) aims to be an open source version of GitHub Copilot, a language model (based on GPT-3, called GPT-Codex) fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub.
Pricing: Free
Just a second, mate! Let me wait for the code suggestions to load. Second Mate is another open-source AI code completion plugin. It uses EleutherAI GPT-Neo-2.7B (via Huggingface Model Hub) for Emacs. It is a much smaller model, so it will likely not be as effective as CodeWhisperer, Tabnine, or other alternatives.
Pricing: Free
Even though it is no longer maintained or available, we remember Kite fondly. This security-aware coding assistant was one of the more user-friendly and flexible players in the arena. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there was no indication that Kite would ever return to the ring.
The six solutions listed above are not the only ones out there. YouCompleteMe, Google’s mysterious AI pair programmer, and other niche code completion and AI pair programming tools will continue to pop up as the battle for the role of your virtual coding assistant rages on. CodeWhisperer is still very new on the block, and it may take some time before it is adopted beyond the AWS fanbase.
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