Amazon has made its AI-powered coding assistance free for developers. This is a significant price cut compared to its Microsoft-made competitor. Amazon announced in an post shared on Thursday that its CodeWhisperer software is now free for anyone who registers to use it.
Amazon released CodeWhisperer last year as a preview. Developers can use it within various integrated development environment (IDEs), such as Visual Studio Code to generate code based upon a text-based request. The original version was only available to Amazon Web Services users, but the recently announced free tier will make it more accessible to other developers.
CodeWhisperer filters out code suggestions which are biased or unfair, and flags code which is similar to open source training data. Security scanning tools can also be used to identify security flaws in a developer’s source code. They will then provide suggestions on how to close these security gaps. CodeWhisperer supports a variety of languages including Python, JavaScript TypeScript and C#. It also supports Go, Rust PHP, Ruby Kotlin Kotlin C++ Shell scripting SQL and Scala.
Microsoft’s GitHub, which is owned by Amazon , beat Amazon with its Copilot AI Tool announced in June last year. Microsoft’s coding assistant, which generates code and offers suggestions from an IDE for developers and students working on open-source projects is free. All other users must pay 10 per month or $100 for access. Google DeepMind’s Alpha Code tool is also available, but still in beta testing.
Amazon has announced other AI-related updates. is also launching Bedrock which will help companies create and scale generative AI applications. The platform comes with a number of foundational models that developers can use, such as Anthropic’s Claude and Stable Diffusion. Third parties should be able to easily create AI-powered tools which can generate text, answer queries, create summaries and more.
