Amazon Q Developer

Formerly called Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon Q Developer is the tech giant’s AI coding assistant that is built to get more done faster. Trained on billions of lines of code, it can generate code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions in real time based on your comments and existing code.

The tool can flag or filter code suggestions that resemble open-source training data, providing you with the associated open-source project’s repository URL and license so that you can more easily review them and add attribution.

Also, it allows you to scan your code to detect hard-to-find vulnerabilities and get code suggestions to remediate them immediately. Amazon Q Developer will help you align to best practices for tackling security vulnerabilities, such as those outlined by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), or those that don’t meet crypto library best practices and other similar security best practices.

It supports 15 programming languages, including Python, Java, and JavaScript, and can sing along all the popular IDEs, such as VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, AWS Cloud9, AWS Lambda console, JupyterLab and Amazon SageMaker Studio.

You can customize Amazon Q Developer to generate more relevant recommendations by making it aware of your internal libraries, APIs, packages, classes, and methods, significantly accelerating development.

During the preview phase, Amazon ran a productivity challenge and participants who used Amazon Q Developer were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and did so an average of 57% faster than those who did not use Q Developer.

So it works and if you’re a developer, you’ll want to consider including it in your toolbox.