I have recently begun using Amazon CodeWhisperer and am continually impressed by its ability to save me time by automating typing, reducing syntax lookup, and error reduction. The tool is available for multiple IDEs, including Visual Studio Code and PyCharm, and supports multiple languages, such as Python, Java, and C#. I have been using it for Python in Visual Studio Code.
The first step is to add the AWS Toolkit extension to VS Code:
The next step is to sign up for CodeWhisperer, using a personal email address. The product is free for individual use with unlimited code suggestions. The extension exchanges a code with an Amazon website to enable the product to run. After this brief sign-up process, you are ready to go.
For example, to create a Python program to select data from a Postgres table, I provided the following comment line:
#connect to a postgres database and cust_id, cust_name, create_ts from public.dc_customer ordered by cust_name
and hit the enter key at the end of the command line. CodeWhisperer starts suggesting the required lines of code such as “import psycopg2”, “try:” etc.
Each suggestion shows up in grey text and if you want to accept the suggestion, use the tab key and it will be converted to code with the proper highlighting and indentation.
I continued to accept the suggestions in the next few screenshots:
After the “finally” block, all of the logic requested in the first comment line was in place. I made two changes to the code created by CodeWhisperer; added in the dbname, host, password etc. and added “FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY”.
The code executed without any errors:
Complete details on Amazon CodeWhisperer can be found on this page.
