A couple of weeks ago, I requested access to AWS CodeWhisperer. Today I’ve got a Preview Access Code.

After paying for Copilot’s annual license and using it for a time, I have some expectations about CodeWhisperer.

I’m a big fan of Visual Studio Code, so I went ahead and tried the VS Code instructions.

Step 1, Step 2… CodeWhisperer is installed.

In Visual Studio Code, go to the AWS Toolkit Panel and expand Developers Tools. Then enter your Preview Access Code.

You are presented with the “Amazon CodeWhisperer Preview Terms.” Click on Next (I think it was a Next, the button was blank.) And… you are done; you get the “How to Use Amazon CodeWhisperer” documentation.

Chinese comment

CodeWhisperer is very similar to Copilot. The first thing that caught my attention is that you can get recommendations anytime with a hotkey (Option + C on Mac, Alt + C on Win.)

I tried it several times with different code blocks, and the suggestions were good, although I’ve got some comments in Chinese.

Is English?

In one of the projects I’m working on, I needed to detect non-English strings. I did what most of us will do: googled it and clicked on the first StackOverflow link.

When I returned to Visual Studio and typed “def _is_english,” CodeWhisperer suggested the same code I found.

If this new AI coding assistant can save me the time to google and copy and paste from StackOverflow, I welcome it to my daily development toolbox.

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Leo Celis