Vibe coding with Amazon Q Developer CLI

I have been writing a lot recently about AI Coding Assistants, and I have been mostly using Amazon Q Developer within VSCode. This week though, saw a very nice update to the Amazon Q Developer CLI, a separate download that provides you with Amazon Q within your command line. It is available for MacOS and various flavours of Linux (you can download it from here).

I wanted to see how good the recent update is, so I decided to try and build a quick web application from the command line. I created a new directory on my mac, and then I added two files:

When I look at the structure of my directory, it looks like this:

From the command line, I now type:

And I enter the following prompt:

You can see what happens in this short video - I sped up some parts (x2) to make the video shorter.

It took around 12 minutes to complete, and I was super impressed. After it generated the code you can see I ask it to create a virtual Python environment, install the dependencies, and then run the application. After an initial error, Amazon Q Developer CLI figures out what it needs to do and I have my app up and running.

For the eagle eyed out there, you will notice that when I create a new fact, there is an issue with the formatting of the buttons. So I decided to go back and get Amazon Q Developer CLI to see if it could fix it.

In less than five minutes I had a much improved UI.

Whilst I will still be using Amazon Q Developer in the IDE, this improved capability within the command line is going to be exciting to explore. Watch this space for more blog posts coming.

You can try Amazon Q Developer CLI for free today, by signing up for a Builder ID and then downloading the app from here.