Amazon Launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI Pair Programming Tool

At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced the launch of CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool similar to GitHub's Copilot that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes. From a report: The company trained the system, which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python, on billions of lines of publicly available open-source code and its own codebase, as well as publicly available documentation and code on public forums. It's now available in preview as part of the AWS IDE Toolkit, which means developers can immediately use it right inside their preferred IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm and Amazon's own AWS Cloud 9. Support for the AWS Lambda Console is also coming soon. Ahead of today's announcement, Vasi Philomin, Amazon's VP in charge of its AI services, stressed that the company didn't simply create this in order to offer a copy of Copilot. He noted that with CodeGuru, its AI code reviewer and performance profiler, and DevOps Guru, its tool for finding operation issues, the company laid the groundwork for today's launch quite a few years ago.

Odd! I didn't see

[oldgraybeard]

emacs mentioned.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Amazon trying to replace humans with robots, again.

But.. but...

[sapgau]

What if I don't like the names of variables or the choice of loop code?!
Who is going to debug those lambda expressions??
bah!

Re:

[Jeremi]

What if I don't like the names of variables or the choice of loop code?!

It's a good point -- perhaps a subsequent version could be fed a large dataset of code that you previously wrote, and told to "emulate this style". (If Dall-E can do that for paintings, I imagine other AIs could do the same thing for code)

Who is going to debug those lambda expressions??
bah!

I see what you did there :)

Pair programming...

[devslash0]

Can you imagine anything more horrific as a developer than pair programming? If I wanted to talk to someone all day I'd become a politician. Also, good luck getting into any zone at all. Oh, and forget about any kind of freedom - from now on your start times, finish times and lunch breaks have to be in sync. Have I mentioned pair holiday scheduling?

Garbage in, garbage out.

[devslash0]

We've been through this before with other ai-based programming aids. If you train your models on unchecked public repositories, you end up with poor quality code, and full of security vulnerabilities.

Re:Garbage in, garbage out.

[stephanruby]

In other words, the result is just as good as the work from most human programmers.

Re:

[devslash0]

Fair point. Although in my opinion this only makes a stronger case for focusing on the top X% of programmers who write quality code and have some standards.

1982 wants it's 5th generation back

[DeathSquid]

When I started studying CS in 1984, I was told that programming would soon be obsolete because 5th generation systems would replace coders.

And yet, here we are. Programming is a *genuinely* creative process. Computers can only mimic creativity.

Re:

[Visarga]

Humans can run the code and see what happens, these language models can't do that yet. They might have the right idea but can't try to see if it really works. There are a few other language models that have been trained on problems with test cases. Those can generate higher quality code suggestions.