Amazon Q Developer is Amazon"s answer to Microsoft"s GitHub Copilot. It can help developers with coding, testing, upgrading applications, diagnosing errors, performing security scans and fixes, and optimizing AWS resources. Amazon Q Developer offers inline code suggestions, vulnerability scanning, and chat in popular IDEs, including JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, and VS Code.
Recently, Amazon announced support for inline chat in both VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. Inline chat combines the benefits of inline suggestions and in-IDE chat, allowing developers to chat and make changes directly while editing code. Instead of forcing developers to copy responses from the in-IDE chat, inline chat seamlessly merges AI-generated code with the existing code.
To offer better code suggestions and responses, Amazon is now using the latest version of Anthropic"s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which launched this month. According to SWE-bench, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is currently the best model for coding, even outperforming OpenAI"s recently released o1 family of models.
Jose Yapur, Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services (AWS), wrote the following regarding the Amazon Q Developer inline chat feature:
By powering the new inline chat capability with this cutting-edge Anthropic model, Amazon Q Developer is delivering an AI assistant that can help you save time while tackling your most complex coding challenges with unparalleled capabilities. And with seamless model updates handled behind the scenes, you can be confident that your experience will only continue to improve over time.
Developers can update or install the latest Amazon Q Developer extension on VS Code or JetBrains to use this feature immediately. This new inline chat feature is available even for developers using the Amazon Q Developer Free tier. To use inline chat, developers can press ⌘ + I on Mac or Ctrl + I on Windows and enter their query in the text box that appears.