Amazon Q Developer

Amazon Q Developer is AWS's AI assistant for software development, available as a chat and inline autocomplete tool inside VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, the AWS Console, command line, and GitHub via an integration. It writes and explains code, generates unit tests, reviews for security issues, and can carry out multi-step agentic tasks like upgrading Java applications or migrating .NET workloads from Windows to Linux. It replaced CodeWhisperer as AWS's core coding product and folds in what used to be separate AWS chatbot experiences.

What sets it apart is how tightly it's wired into AWS itself. It can answer questions about a specific account's resources, generate CloudFormation or CDK for infrastructure-as-code, troubleshoot Lambda errors using actual logs, and reference AWS documentation and service quotas directly rather than relying on general training data. Feature development transformation, which automates large-scale code migrations and dependency upgrades, is a capability few competitors offer in the same form.

It's aimed at teams already committed to AWS: platform engineers managing infrastructure, developers maintaining legacy Java or .NET systems on AWS, and organizations that want security scanning and license compliance checks built into the coding workflow. Outside the AWS ecosystem it's less compelling, since its main advantages are specific to AWS services and account context that a generic assistant like Copilot or Cursor wouldn't have visibility into.