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Amazon CodeWhisperer, the AWS AI coding companion, is a step change in developer productivity tools. Based on generative AI technology, Amazon CodeWhisperer offers contextualized code snippets or recommendations based on natural language prompts to build software quickly, responsibly, and securely. It enables productivity gains and increases accuracy for accelerated digital transformations. Amazon CodeWhisperer ensures enterprises have greater control over AI-generated code, especially the code written by developers who may have a limited understanding of code attribution, quality, and security requirements.
Persistent Systems, a global digital engineering provider, has run several pilots and formal studies with Amazon CodeWhisperer that point to shifts in software engineering, generative AI-led modernization, responsible innovation, and more. This post highlights four themes emerging from Persistent’s Amazon CodeWhisperer experiments that could change software engineering as we know it.
In this section, we discuss some of the ways that Amazon CodeWhisperer is reimagining coding.
Ownership, explainability, and transparency of AI-generated code are the most contentious points for the commercial adoption of coding companions such as Amazon CodeWhisperer. Amazon gives developers complete ownership of the code they write using Amazon CodeWhisperer. The Amazon CodeWhisperer team has carefully curated the training data and omitted restrictive licenses, ensuring developers don’t inadvertently use restrictively licensed code when they use Amazon CodeWhisperer. In addition, because recommender pipelines can be strongly influenced by open-source code, if Amazon CodeWhisperer detects a lineage, it flags the license references (for example, MIT or Apache, an open-source project). This enables the developer to attribute code snippets to the source owners, instituting coding best practices. Although Amazon collects data such as code snippets, recommendations, and comments from files open in the integrated development environment, for Amazon CodeWhisperer Professional users, these are not stored or used to train the model. Also, Amazon CodeWhisperer Individual users can opt out of sharing content with AWS, limiting the chances of this being reproduced as recommendations to other users.
Persistent’s approach to generative AI mirrors Richard P. Feynman’s thinking, who said, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” Persistent prioritizes responsibility, accountability, and transparency to build client trust. One example of the potential of Amazon CodeWhisperer lies in its ability to reference code, helping clients circumvent legal liabilities that could derail other rewards. For more information about Persistent’s approach to generative AI, refer to Generative AI Services and Solutions.
Seasoned developers will tell you that security cannot be tested-in; it must be built from the ground up. Although some approaches, such as DevSecOps, make it easier for developers, code security experts, and operations teams to embed security testing while the code is written, Amazon CodeWhisperer takes this one step further. It runs security scans on the code directly in the integrated development environment (IDE), allowing a single developer resource to test the code for quality and security. This highly automated, shift-left scenario for security testing enables enterprises to arrest defects upstream and remedy them at a fraction of the cost and time. Especially now, when coding, with the advent of generative AI moving closer to business users, the automated, in-line security scans in Amazon CodeWhisperer will provide less rework, faster time to production, and resilient code.
Persistent helps leading global organizations fortify their business applications with code embedded with security guardrails. It believes security testing has to shift closer to the developer (professional or citizen) and be encoded into applications as they are written. Amazon CodeWhisperer, with its transformative power to fast-track not just coding but secure coding, fits well into the narrative.
Most developers must undergo at least 4 months of training before being tagged to projects. In our pilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer condensed the training period to 1 month with reduced cognitive load concerning understanding the context or coding language. We see this bearing on how companies hire developers, evaluating not the coding knowledge, which has been largely abstracted, but on the prompt engineering expertise and the ability to be creative with tools such as Amazon CodeWhisperer.
The parameters for professional developers will change, and quickly depending on their ability to tune the input to get the desired answer. This also opens the field for citizen developers or business technologists, bringing coding closer to the business.
With so many moving parts, businesses and their technology partners will return to the whiteboard together. The engagement model will evolve to factor in these new variables (such as faster coding timelines, secure code, more citizen developers, or domain-oriented developers) unleashed by Amazon CodeWhisperer. Coding will now move closer to the business, automatically incorporating security guardrails and mandatory regulations into software applications as they are written, all at scale. And with verticalized workloads, success will depend on the development team’s domain expertise and the ability to translate code into innovation. This means the implementation of the company’s vision through this code will become even more watertight because it adheres to strategic pillars of security, quality, and speed.
We extrapolated these themes to map a future where Amazon CodeWhisperer can help realize “delivery moon shots” that, up until now, were aspirational. The future looks something like this:
Amazon CodeWhisperer goes beyond improving developer productivity: it democratizes coding and brings it closer to business users while ensuring best practices such as code attribution and enhanced security are never out of the purview.
Persistent is excited about Amazon CodeWhisperer and its potential impact on businesses and partners. It is working to create an Amazon CodeWhisperer-ready developer workforce and alerting its customers about its benefits to drive adoption. Persistent’s strong partnership with AWS makes it the best-fit technology partner to help businesses capitalize on the intrinsic value of Amazon CodeWhisperer.
To learn more about Persistent’s generative AI philosophy that reimagines the way software is engineered today and how Amazon CodeWhisperer aligns with it, refer to Generative AI Services and Solutions.
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