Amazon launches free programming assistant – 04/13/2023 – Tech

Amazon’s programming assistant, CodeWhisperer, will have a free individual plan starting this Thursday (13), the company announced on its blog.

To access the generating artificial intelligence focused on computing, interested parties only need to provide an email address to create an account on Amazon’s cloud service.

According to big tech, the tool can save time on bureaucratic tasks in a programmer’s routine, such as accessing the interface of specific programs (done via technology called API). This process requires the developer to know the rules defined by each platform, with which artificial intelligence is already familiar.

A preliminary version of CodeWhisperer was announced in June 2022. In the same month, Microsoft announced to the public the launch of GitHub CoPilot, which dominates the market and needs a subscription of US$ 10 (R$ 49.40) per month —the annual plan costs US$ 100 (R$ 494.00).

Competing technology also makes a free version available, but only for students and contributors to recognized open source projects.

CodeWhisperer is able to offer suggestions in programming languages ​​such as Python, Java, SQL, PHP, C and its variations, among others.

After registering with Amazon Web Services, the AI ​​is available on the programming platforms Visual Studio Code, GoLand, WebStorm, PyCharm and also on native Amazon development environments.

To request programming suggestions for the generative artificial intelligence, the user needs to write the request in the form of a comment. The robot then responds automatically.

The professional version of CodeWhisperer costs US$ 19 (R$ 93.27) and grants exclusive access to options aimed at the corporate environment, such as referencing codes to avoid plagiarism and other security features

According to Amazon’s own tests, programmers helped by CodeWhisperer were 27% more likely to complete tasks than professionals without help. Task execution time was also 57% shorter with AI.

The technology warns the user if the generated programming snippet is similar to open codes used to train artificial intelligence, to avoid intellectual property problems. It also warns about prejudiced or biased codes.

CodeWhisper even detects holes in the code that can open the way for malicious programs and other cyber attacks.