Amazon's Code Whisperer AI coding assistant now available for free, challenging Microsoft's paid version

In a move that undercuts Microsoft, Amazon is offering its AI-powered CodeWhisperer coding assistant for free, whereas Microsoft charges $10 per month for a similar product. CodeWhisperer, initially launched last year as preview, can be integrated with various IDEs to generate lines of code based on text-based prompts. The assistant filters out any suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair and flags any code that resembles open-source training data. It also comes with security scanning features that can spot vulnerabilities within a user's code and suggests fixes. CodeWhisperer supports several programming languages including Python, Java, and C#.