AWS has announced the general availability of Amazon Q Developer’s (in your IDE) customization capability for inline code completion, and the launch of a preview of customization for the chat. Developers can now customize Amazon Q to generate specific code recommendations from private code repositories in the IDE code editor and in the chat.
Amazon Q Developer is an artificial intelligence (AI) coding companion. It helps software developers accelerate application development by offering code recommendations in their integrated development environments (IDE) derived from existing comments and code. Behind the scenes, Amazon Q uses large language models (LLMs) trained on billions of lines of code from Amazon and open source projects.
Customizing Amazon Q with your own code base lets you get even more relevant code recommendations that are based on your organization’s internal libraries, APIs, packages, classes, and methods. For example, a developer working for a financial company can ask Amazon Q to generate a function to compute the total portfolio value for a customer. Amazon Q can then suggest code to implement that function based on the examples it learned from your organization’s private code base.
Developers can also ask questions about their organization’s code in the chat. In the example above, let’s imagine the developer is new to the team and doesn’t know how to retrieve a customer ID. He can ask the question in the chat in plain English: how do I connect to the database to retrieve the customerId for a specific customer? Amazon Q chat could answer: I found a function to retrieve customerId based on customer first and last name which uses the database connection XYZ…
What I found particularly interesting in this announcement is the ability to customize the chat. As a former developer, I often found myself browsing through the code base to understand how certain pieces of code worked or to find examples of how to use certain functions or classes. Being able to ask questions about my code base in the chat and get answers in plain English would save me a lot of time and effort.
Overall, I think the ability to customize Amazon Q Developer (in your IDE) is a very valuable addition to the tool. It will help developers be more productive by providing them with more relevant code recommendations. It will also help new developers get up to speed on new code bases faster by providing them with an easy way to ask questions and get answers about the code.
