AWS CodeWhisperer

Exploring AWS CodeWhisperer Features

Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI generative tool which provides recommendations to developers to develop their software application. This service helps developers by improving their productivity by providing code recommendations based on the comments and the prior code developed by the developers. By using CodeWhisperer developers can simply write a comment “Upload the files to S3” CodeWhisperer will provide the code recommendations based on the comments provided by the developers by automatically determining the cloud services and the required libraries that are best suited for the given requirement and provides the generated code snippet directly on the IDEs. CodeWhisperer automatically generates code suggestion on the IDE based on the Existing code and the comment written by the developers. The recommendation provided by the CodeWhisperer can vary in size and scope based on the single line comment to fully formed function. 

Actions to Get Code Recommendation

Developer can get the code recommendation by performing below actions:  

• To manually trigger CodeWhisperer: MacOS: Option + C and Windows: Alt + C 
• To accept the recommendation: Tab 
• To go to the Next recommendation: Down Arrow 
• To go back to the Previous recommendation: Up Arrow 
• To Reject the recommendation: Esc.  

CodeWhisperer can generate code in 15 programming languages, such as Java, JavaScript, Typescript, Python, C#, Ruby, Go, PHP, C++, C, Shell, Scala, Rust, SQL and Kotlin. The quality and the accuracy of the code depends on the size and the quality of the training data.  

Developers can use CodeWhisperer in IDEs like Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, Amazon Sagemaker Studio, Jupyterlab, AWS Cloud9, AWS Lambda and AWS Glue Studio. 

AWS CodeWhisperer can protect your code from security vulnerability by scanning your code to highlight and define security issues. Run Security Scan will help you to perform security scans on currently active files, its dependent files from the project in the IDE editors.  Once the security scan is complete the security issues are highlighted in the problems panel on visual studio code. The security scan in the CodeWhisperer is integrated with Amazon CodeGuru Service which does filtering before scanning the code, it also filters unsupported languages, test codes which includes open-source code

Two- tiers of CodeWhisperer

1. Individual Tiers: 

This is a free tier which can be used by individual developers to develop the application software. Developers need to sign-up and sign-in to the builder ID to use CodeWhisperer in IDE which will provide the code recommendations within a minute. 

2. Professional Tiers: 

The Professional tiers provides the administrative capability to the organization to provide their developers with access to the CodeWhisperer. CodeWhisperer provides the organizational license management to centrally manage the accessibility of the Codewhisperer by the developers. Organizations can also set the service policies at the organizational level accessibility of the CodeWhisperer service. Each developer in the professional tier will be changed $19 per month and the organizations are billed based on the maximum number of users using CodeWhisperer features. 

Steps to enable CodeWhisperer in Visual Studio Code (VSC)

1. Install VSC IDE/Update the VSC IDE 

2. Install AWS Toolkit for VSC 

3. Configure the AWS Credentials to AWS CLI to enable access to AWS resources. 

4. Select AWS Toolset panel from VSC, under AWS Developer tool, under CodeWhisperer, Select Start 

5. From the Dropdown menu, select Use a personal email to sign-up and sign-in with AWS Builder ID 

6. Authenticate and Authorize the Builder ID to enable Code Whisperer on VSC IDE 

7. Once CodeWhipserer is enabled, start writing the comments to get the code recommendations. 

References

https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/

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