CodeWhisperer: AWS AI for writing a faster, more reliable and more secure code

The AWS stack of services now has a tool that helps develop a code up to 57% faster, according to a productivity challenge conducted by AWS pre-release. It’s called CodeWhisperer and it’s becoming the AI coding companion of many developers. 

AWS is launching CodeWhisperer in April of this year to take on GitHub Copilot. With this artificial intelligence tool, developers see their work facilitated and accelerated by code auto-completion, process optimization, contextual suggestions and, a very strong and important point, code analyzer to improve security. 

This security aspect is one of CodeWhisperer’s strengths, as it detects hard-to-find vulnerabilities and generates code suggestions to fix them immediately. It also makes it easy to follow recommended practices to address those security vulnerabilities, such as those described by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), or similar cryptographic or security practices.

Example of security vulnerability detection. Source: AWS CodeWhisperer website

CodeWhisperer is basically an AI that facilitates and accelerates the coding process in software development, applying ML and advanced AI algorithms to analyze the code in real time. It is part of the Generative AI variants that have been arriving on the market recently, enriching coding with elements such as automatic suggestions, auto-completion or analysis and review. It is also very flexible, adapting to the way developers work, being able to select from 15 programming languages (such as Python, Java or JavaScript) and their usual development environments (such as VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA or AWS Cloud9). 

It is an innovative tool in code writing, as it is able to understand the context and logic of what is being created, so that its recommendations are highly accurate and personalized, learning and adapting for each project and developer.

5 benefits of using CodeWhisperer

1. Improves code quality: helps improve code quality by performing in-depth static analysis. It detects bugs, vulnerabilities and bad practices in source code, allowing developers to fix them before they become major problems. This helps reduce bugs and debugging times, which in turn increases software quality.
2. Increases productivity: automates many repetitive and tedious tasks in the development process. It provides features such as automatic refactoring, code hinting and code generation, saving developers time and effort. By automating these tasks, developers can focus on solving more complex problems and developing features more efficiently.
3. Facilitates collaboration: Provides features that facilitate team collaboration. It allows developers to share and review code efficiently, which facilitates the code review process. In addition, it offers the ability to set coding standards and apply custom rules to ensure that code meets the requirements set by the team.
4. Accelerates learning: can be an excellent tool for novice developers or those who want to learn a new programming language. It provides contextual code hints, built-in documentation and code samples, which helps developers better understand best practices and coding patterns. This can speed up the learning process and enable developers to acquire new programming skills more quickly.
5. Promotes good coding practices: can help foster good coding practices within a team. By providing static analysis and code hints, it helps developers follow consistent coding standards and avoid problematic code patterns. This can lead to more readable, maintainable and robust code.

CodeWhisperer in practice

A Medium user, @Mani had the opportunity to try the preview of this service in July 2022 and shared the experience in this post: Getting started with Amazon CodeWhisperer.

Test excerpt from the preview of CodeWhisperer in July 2022. Source: Medium @Mani

You also have available, from this same user, a new recent test: Amazon CodeWhisperer – Stepping on the accelerator, in which he acknowledges that the tool helped him in 80% of his code. 

At Keepler we are already extending the use of CodeWhisperer among our team as part of our best practices to seek efficiency and improve productivity in our developments. We hope to share results very soon. 

Would you like to try it? In this video you can see it in operation:

Image: Freepik