Memoirs of tinkering with AI-assisted coding tool CodeWhisperer

I have spent the last few weeks tinkering with AWS’s AI-assisted code development tool CodeWhisperer, focused on Python programming. This article presents my experience and raises questions as to whether all profiles of programmers, from beginners through to experts, will benefit from using these tools to increase programming productivity.

Image courtesy of AWS

While AI-assisted tools have been around for quite a while now, with many products available, I was hesitant to enter into this “new world”. My concerns came from the fact that I am a software developer because I like to be challenged — software developers solve challenging problems using technology as our tool.

Evidently, and with good reason, productivity is seen as the main proponent for using these tools. During my tinkering, while most of my productivity gains were found using it with VS Code’s extension, “AWS Toolkit”. CodeWhisperer is also available for use when developing Lambda functions online in AWS, although it wasn’t as productive and interactive as the former.

CodeWhisperer on AWS is only available at us-east-1 availability zone

After a few weeks of tinkering, I have reached the disputable opinion that AI-assisted tools do offer many…