At AWS re:Invent today, Amazon announced updates to its generative AI assistant for software developers, Amazon Q Developer.
There are three new agents that automate unit testing, documentation, and code reviews. Developers can make it generate a test by typing “/test” in the chat window or highlighting a specific block of code to test. It utilizes its overall knowledge of the project to generate the necessary tests for the code.
Similarly, developers can now type “/doc” in the chat window to get the assistant to automatically generate documentation and update README files. Developers can also ask questions about how their code works or ask it to improve existing documentation.
And finally, typing “/review” will make Amazon Q flag suspicious code patterns, identify open source package risks, and assess the impact of changes. They can also use “/q review” in GitLab Duo to have Amazon Q review their merge requests.
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Beyond these three new agents, Amazon also announced that the tool can now make suggestions about operational issues in a customer’s AWS environment, based on its understanding of the relationships between AWS resources, such as those in Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Health, and AWS X-Ray.
“It can quickly sift through hundreds of thousands of data points to discover relationships between services and develop an understanding of how they work together to identify anomalies across related signals. After analyzing its findings, Amazon Q presents users with potential hypotheses for the root cause of the issue and guides users through how to fix it—a combination of capabilities that no other major cloud provider offers,” Amazon wrote in an announcement.
The company also made general improvements to Amazon Q Developer’s ability to modernize legacy workloads, such as improving the speed of .NET modernization, transforming VMware workloads, and accelerating mainframe modernization.
“We are combining Amazon Q Developer with our nearly two decades of experience helping organizations migrate and modernize their legacy workloads on AWS to accelerate and simplify large-scale transformations,” said Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of technology at AWS. “This is a game-changer for customers and partners looking to move off of Windows .NET, VMware, and mainframes. Now, Amazon Q significantly speeds up application transformation projects with agents that can autonomously complete some of the most labor-intensive tasks, such as analyzing, planning, code generation, and testing, saving customers time and money, and helping them realize the full value of the cloud.”