By Anirban Ghoshal
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said that it was making its generative AI-powered coding assistant Amazon Q Developer generally available.
Introduced as the evolution of Amazon CodeWhisperer at AWS re:Invent in November, Amazon Q will compete with rival offerings such as GitHub Copilot, Gemini Code Assist, and IBM’s Watsonx Code Assistant, AWS said.
The generative AI-based coding assistant can perform tasks such as generating code, testing code, upgrading applications, troubleshooting applications, performing security fixes, and optimizing AWS resources, the company added.
“Q also has a powerful customization capability that securely leverages a customer’s internal code base to provide more relevant and useful code recommendations. With this capability, Q is an expert on your code and provides recommendations that are more relevant to save even more time,” Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of technology at AWS, said.
The cloud services provider also claimed that the coding assistant has a relatively high code acceptance rate with the BT Group and the National Australia Bank, which have accepted 37% and 50% of Q’s code suggestions respectively. Other customers of the AWS coding assistant include Toyota and BlackBerry.
Amazon Q Developer gets Java conversion ability
The generally available version for Amazon Q Developer also comes with the ability to convert old Java code to a newer version.
“In their integrated development environments (IDE), developers simply ask Amazon Q to ‘transform’ their project and the agent analyzes application source code, generates new code in the target language or version, executes tests, and completes all code changes,” Bukovec said.
A five-person team at Amazon used Q to upgrade more than 1,000 production applications from Java 8 to Java 17 in just two days in contrast to earlier upgrade cycles of two days per application, the vice president said.
The ability to convert .NET code to help enterprises move from Windows to Linux is expected to be added soon.
Amazon Q Developer, according to the company, can be accessed via the AWS management console by selecting Q from the menu. The coding assistant also can be used via Slack or development environments such as Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs.
In order to extend access for the coding assistant, the public cloud services provider has developed integrations with the likes of Datadog, Wiz, and GitLab Duo.
Developers also can connect Q to GitHub via a data connector, the company said.
Amazon Q Developer puts Agents to work
Amazon Q Developer also comes with another capability, dubbed Agents.
These bots can autonomously perform tasks ranging from implementing features, to documenting and refactoring code, to performing software upgrades, AWS said, adding that developers can ask Q to implement an application feature and the agent will analyze their existing application code and generate a step-by-step implementation plan.
Further, developers can collaborate with the agent to review and iterate on the plan before the agent implements it, connecting multiple steps together and applying updates across source files, code blocks, and test suites.
