Amazon Q Developer new agents: my dream became a reality!
Why coding, modernizing, testing, review and documenting software with genAI is a game changer
Vinicius Senger
Amazon Employee
Published Dec 6, 2024
re:Invent 2024 just wrapped up—or almost, since the re:Play party is about to kick off—and wow, what a year to be alive!
A.I. isn’t just changing our lives; it has already transformed them and genAI for coders is no longer a distant dream—it's a reality that every developer must experience.
Let me share how my personal dream became a reality to give you some context. Back in 2003, I created my own MVC framework called JAREF—before Struts, Spring, or other frameworks became mainstream. It's still used in production today, with hundreds of classes handling commands, dispatchers, and more. However, modernizing and refactoring it manually was always a challenge due to three reasons: cost, cost, and cost!
Ever since the genAI wave began, I’ve said in my talks:
"Someday, genAI will make it possible to modernize Java base code with low cost and high productivity."
That day has finally arrived—and the future is only getting brighter.
I’ve been using Amazon Q Developer weekly, and it has completely transformed how I approach modernization projects. For instance, I created a simple Quarkus architecture as a reference implementation for the backend. Then, I opened the project in my favorite IDEs—VS Code, IntelliJ, and Eclipse—and started prompting Amazon Q Developer with requests like:
"Based on my @workspace, how can I refactor this code to work with the current architecture? <provided code snippet>"
The results are incredible and it’s amazing how Amazon Q Developer supports both new and experienced developers tackling complex modernization projects. I know what you might be thinking:
"But isn’t it still a lot of manual work—class by class, review by review, and trying to understand someone else’s code?"
Now imagine a world where “development agents” could transform, create, review, generate tests or document your code automatically. Well, that dream is now a reality!
Amazon Q Developer already features agents for code development (
/dev) and code transformation (/transform). But at this week’s re:Invent, we announced three exciting new agents: /test for unit test creation, /doc for documenting codebases and /review for automated code reviews. I’ve been testing these with my existing Quarkus project, and they’ve blown me away.For example, I opened a project with a default Quarkus
README.md file, and /doc generated an incredible documentation file detailing all project artifacts, instructions for running it locally, testing the REST API, and even tips for working with Docker and AWS Lambda. It’s so good that I’ve become a documentation enthusiast overnight!Why wait? Try it yourself!
Three new Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities for software development are now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Q Developer is available.
To learn more, visit the Amazon Q Developer product page and the latest blog posts in the AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog channel. Give new Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities a try in your favorite IDE with AWS Builder ID and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Q Developer or feel free to text me on linked.in for any support you need.
Let’s keep dreaming big and turning those dreams into reality.
Cheers!
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.