Undercutting Microsoft, Amazon Offers Free Access to Its AI Coding Assistant 'CodeWhisperer' (theverge.com) 45
Amazon is making its AI-powered coding assistant CodeWhisperer free for individual developers, reports the Verge, "undercutting the $10 per month pricing of its Microsoft-made rival."
Amazon launched CodeWhisperer as a preview last year, which developers can use within various integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt....
CodeWhisperer automatically filters out any code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair and flags any code that's similar to open-source training data. It also comes with security scanning features that can identify vulnerabilities within a developer's code, while providing suggestions to help close any security gaps it uncovers. CodeWhisperer now supports several languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, including Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.
Here's how Amazon's senior developer advocate pitched the usefulness of their "real-time AI coding companion": Helping to keep developers in their flow is increasingly important as, facing increasing time pressure to get their work done, developers are often forced to break that flow to turn to an internet search, sites such as StackOverflow, or their colleagues for help in completing tasks. While this can help them obtain the starter code they need, it's disruptive as they've had to leave their IDE environment to search or ask questions in a forum or find and ask a colleague — further adding to the disruption. Instead, CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE. During the preview we ran a productivity challenge, and participants who used CodeWhisperer were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and did so an average of 57% faster than those who didn't use CodeWhisperer....
It provides additional data for suggestions — for example, the repository URL and license — when code similar to training data is generated, helping lower the risk of using the code and enabling developers to reuse it with confidence.
CodeWhisperer automatically filters out any code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair and flags any code that's similar to open-source training data. It also comes with security scanning features that can identify vulnerabilities within a developer's code, while providing suggestions to help close any security gaps it uncovers. CodeWhisperer now supports several languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, including Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.
Here's how Amazon's senior developer advocate pitched the usefulness of their "real-time AI coding companion": Helping to keep developers in their flow is increasingly important as, facing increasing time pressure to get their work done, developers are often forced to break that flow to turn to an internet search, sites such as StackOverflow, or their colleagues for help in completing tasks. While this can help them obtain the starter code they need, it's disruptive as they've had to leave their IDE environment to search or ask questions in a forum or find and ask a colleague — further adding to the disruption. Instead, CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE. During the preview we ran a productivity challenge, and participants who used CodeWhisperer were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and did so an average of 57% faster than those who didn't use CodeWhisperer....
It provides additional data for suggestions — for example, the repository URL and license — when code similar to training data is generated, helping lower the risk of using the code and enabling developers to reuse it with confidence.
Yeah, yeah, fool me once. (Score:5, Insightful)
free for individual developers
So that you can make it better and then we'll lock it behind a paywall. I think by this point we all already know how this goes.
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Yes, we do.
20 years ago, I paid $500 for a noncommercial license for Visual Studio. Today, it's free for noncommercial use. It's been that way for quite a few years. I don't see that pattern reversing any time soon.
Re:Yeah, yeah, fool me once. (Score:5, Informative)
VS Code and community editions are free, Visual Studio is NOT.
That’s not (completely) correct: the Community Edition is free for: a) open source projects; b) individual developers (including commercial usage); c) organizations up to 250 PCs or US$ 1 million of revenue/year (max five seats) and it has 90% of the features of the Professional version: the missing 10% is made of features that you would only use in an enterprise setting anyway. It’s not a completely different product (like VS Code) but a cut-down version where the cut, for individua ldevelopers and smaller shops, is really no that significant.
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Yeah Microsoft didn't do it out of the goodness of their heart though. VS Code CE is free because all kinds of open source alternatives came about. Anyone notice how Amazon's offering here is distinctly NOT open source?
Y'all got to stop forgetting this whole aspect. None of them are doing CE versions to be the good guy, they're doing it so that everyone doesn't completely leave. There's no pressure at the moment for Amazon to keep the service free forever, so they are absolutely NOT going to keep the se
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For a start, there is no VS Code CE other than in your imagination yet you ranted and ranted.
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Hopefully. There are still a ton of clueless around, but they do not write code that is any good anyways.
As a user of GitHub Copilot (Score:2)
I welcome competition for GitHub Copilot. I haven't used Microsoft's offering yet. But I have read some reviews, and it appears it isn't as good. Not yet, at least.
Re:As a user of GitHub Copilot (Score:5, Insightful)
ChatGPT is most definitely not useless. It's helped me knock together programs much faster than I could have on my own. I don't need perfection - I can fix mistakes.
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So CodeWhisperer is better than GitHub Copilot?
Do you know if CodeWhisperer can work without an IDE? I don't develop in one.
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Does it relaly help with design "flow" (Score:3)
There are cases where I don't know what I need to do next - but code completion doesn't help. I need to spend time reading and understanding how to do those parts - so going to stackoverflow or similar is no slower. Surely people don't just accept code suggestions without knowing what they do.
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At least for me the constant suggestions from Visual Studio Code and other code assistants is distracting 95% of the time I know exactly what I want to type and having suggestions flash up on my screen slows me down. The suggestions are usually correct, but I still have to check every one and that takes longer than just typing.
There are cases where I don't know what I need to do next - but code completion doesn't help. I need to spend time reading and understanding how to do those parts - so going to stackoverflow or similar is no slower. Surely people don't just accept code suggestions without knowing what they do.
Are you talking ordinary suggestions or the AI assistants?
Where the AI assistants really shine is when I want to do X, but it would take me 30 seconds or so to think how to do X, or worse, a bit of hunting around online to find the proper API hooks. In that case they really do save me some time effort I can better spent elsewhere.
Where they really suck is comments as their higher level understanding of what I want to do is often blatantly wrong.
How much code analysis ... (Score:2)
is now done up in the cloud, the mother ship? What security risk does this entail ?
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Massive security risk
The cloud services and accounts represent a security risk and performance comparable to what it is, leveraged hosting.
Biased or unfair? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is the definition of 'biased' or 'unfair' code?
Asking for a friend.
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That is a fair question. Code is math, it is innately unbiased and fair.
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I suppose it could detect "offensive" variable names - but so could a word search.
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Nobody is talking about what code can be used for, sweetheart. Code can even nuke the planet, sweetheart. For fuck sakes why is every god damned thing somehow an opportunity for you to strawman weasel your bullshit on everybody?
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Pssst.... Please don't tell them that all floating point numbers are biased [wikipedia.org].
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'Unb
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Here's an example [ft.com] of how 'unbiased' has come to be defined in the context of AI:
'Unbiased' AI is that which enforces prevailing social norms.
Well conversion therapy is junk science that causes depression and other mental health issues, so if the LLM was trying to convince someone to use conversion therapy then I think it would be a bug.
As for bias & stereotypes more generally. For sure there's a level where things are ambiguous, but people love stereotypes and I don't think it's good if the chat bot just keeps regurgitating stereotypes.
As for what they're actually talking about, FTA:
Lastly, we’re implementing techniques to detect bias
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Gay conversion therapy is exactly as effective or ineffective as anything else in psychology. So, not very effective. But it's not like whatever determines human drives decides how responsive to conscious manipulation it will be based on whether it is something that "deserves" to be changed.
The problem isn't that it's ineffective at changing their orientation.
The problem is it's very effective in creating other psychological problems, like depression and suicide.
Not really trying to compete on Microsoft turf (Score:2)
Most Microsoft .NET development in done in Visual Studio. There's no indication Amazon is adding, or planning ot add, support for that IDE.