Amazon has launched a preview of CodeWhisperer, a programming companion that uses machine learning to assist development.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly taking on an important role in development. The technologies can be used to automate testing, ensure build quality, and assist with actual coding. GitHub has Copilot, and now AWS is previewing CodeWhisperer.

“CodeWhisperer will continually examine your code and your comments, and present you with syntactically correct recommendations,” writes Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS. “The recommendations are synthesized based on your coding style and variable names, and are not simply snippets.

“CodeWhisperer uses multiple contextual clues to drive recommendations including the cursor location in the source code, code that precedes the cursor, comments, and code in other files in the same projects. You can use the recommendations as-is, or you can enhance and customize them as needed. As I mentioned earlier, we trained (and continue to train) CodeWhisperer on billions of lines of code drawn from open source repositories, internal Amazon repositories, API documentation, and forums.”

Those interested in joining the preview and testing CodeWhisperer can do so here.