on the surface, GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer Don’t look so different.both Accelerate your software development process with AIIt’s also owned by major technology companies (Microsoft for Copilot, Amazon for CodeWhisperer) and integrated with their ecosystems, making it different from startup-owned AI-assisted development tools such as . tab ninerather than a tech giant.
However, if you dig into the details, you’ll notice that Copilot and CodeWhisperer behave slightly differently, as explained in this article. It also focuses on a different set of use cases. This is the most important difference between them.
What is GitHub Copilot?
Copilot is an AI-assisted software development tool. Github (This is owned by Microsoft). GitHub will introduce in his 2021 and open to the public in 2022.
Copilot works by analyzing the code written by developers (including comments explaining how the code works, even if the code itself hasn’t been written yet), to create new code provides automatic suggestions for Under the hood, Copilot makes use of the OpenAI Codex. This is an AI model trained on code in millions of public source code repositories.
What is Amazon CodeWhisperer?
CodeWhisperer is Amazon’s AI-assisted software development tool. Like Copilot, CodeWhisperer interprets comments made by developers and automatically suggests code they want to implement.
Amazon doesn’t reveal many details about how CodeWhisperer works on the backend, but To tell The AI models powering the tool were trained using both open source code and code internal to Amazon.
GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer: Key Similarities
From a functional point of view, Copilot and CodeWhisperer are very similar. Both serve the same needs and can be used by developers in the same way. With both tools, you basically write what you want your code to do, and the AI model auto-suggests the code it needs to do.
Copilot and CodeWhisperer are also similar in that they are cloud-based solutions offered by major technology vendors.
A third similarity is that neither tool claims to be able to create an entire software program alone (at least not yet). Both Copilot and CodeWhisperer are limited to helping developers complete relatively small segments of code based on the context they provide.
Key differences between Copilot and CodeWhisperer
However, if you dig deeper into each tool’s specific use cases, you’ll notice some key differences between GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer.
The biggest difference is that Copilot is designed as a more general-purpose AI-assisted development tool, while CodeWhisperer is first and foremost for development use cases related to Amazon platforms such as Amazon Web Services.
To be clear, this does not mean that CodeWhisperer cannot be used to help create applications that are not linked in any particular way to the Amazon ecosystem. Yes you can. Nor does it mean that code written with CodeWhisperer will only run on the Amazon platform. Most of the time you can do it anywhere.
Still, CodeWhisperer usually does a better job than Copilot when it comes to writing code related to Amazon technology.If you want to write code to move files between Amazon S3 bucketfor example, or if you work with EC2 instances, CodeWhisperer makes it easy to get to the right code.
In contrast, Copilot is hosted on a Microsoft-owned platform, but doesn’t specifically address Microsoft technologies or Microsoft-related programming use cases. General purpose tool.
Another important difference between Copilot and CodeWhisperer is that CodeWhisperer supports far fewer programming languages and IDEs. Currently, it is only compatible with C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript programming languages, and most of the supported IDEs are Amazon-based (JetBrains and Visual Studio Code are exceptions).
Copilot is not subject to these restrictions. Copilot can generate code in almost any language. Also, GitHub says it’s “optimized” only for certain languages, but a list of such languages, including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, and C++, is what CodeWhisperer says Longer than the list of supported languages. Copilot also supports almost all major IDEs.
Choosing between GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer
Due to the above differences, at this point it seems relatively easy to decide which Copilot or CodeWhisperer is better for your various AI-assisted development needs.
In general, Copilot is an obvious choice as it supports a wider range of use cases. The main reason to choose CodeWhisperer over Copilot today is if you’re writing code related to Amazon APIs and/or AI-assisted development tools that support the limited set of programming languages and IDEs that CodeWhisperer uses. If you only want compatibility.
This may change in the future if Amazon expands CodeWhisperer into a more versatile AI-assisted development platform. But for now, Copilot beats CodeWhisperer in flexibility and breadth, but CodeWhisperer is great at writing code for Amazon’s own APIs.
About the author
Christopher Tozzi is a technology analyst with expertise in cloud computing, application development, open source software, virtualization and containers. He also lectures at major universities in the Albany, New York area. His book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution was published by his MIT Press.
