Amazon Q Developer
AI-powered coding assistant for writing, debugging, transforming, and securing code inside your IDE
Imagine having a senior engineer sitting next to you who has read every line of AWS documentation, every Stack Overflow answer, and your entire codebase, and is always ready to help. Amazon Q Developer is that engineer, but it lives inside your code editor. You write a comment describing what you want, and it writes the code. You ask why your Lambda function is throwing a permissions error, and it explains and suggests the fix. It can scan your entire codebase for security vulnerabilities, upgrade your application from Java 8 to Java 17, and write unit tests for functions you already built. It works inside VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, and Eclipse, as well as directly in the AWS Console. The free tier gives every developer unlimited chat and code completions. You do not need an AWS account to start: sign in with a free AWS Builder ID.
Amazon Q Developer is built on Amazon Bedrock and augmented with a large corpus of AWS documentation, code examples, and best practices. It runs as an IDE extension (VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse) or as a panel inside the AWS Management Console. The Free tier provides unlimited conversational assistance and code completions for individuals, with responses generated in the cloud. The Pro tier ($19 per user per month) adds organisation-wide controls, context from your internal code repositories via Amazon Q personalisation, higher usage limits, and IAM Identity Center integration for enterprise SSO. Security scans run as a separate job, analysing your project's code and dependencies against a vulnerability database and returning findings with line-level remediation suggestions.
Key Capabilities
- Inline code completions in VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, and Eclipse as you type
- Conversational chat for architecture questions, debugging, and AWS service recommendations inside the IDE
- Automated security scanning of your codebase with remediation suggestions, powered by the same engine as Amazon CodeGuru
- Code transformation: automated upgrades from Java 8 or 11 to Java 17 (and beyond) including dependency updates
- Agent for software development: generates multi-file features end-to-end from a natural language prompt
- Free tier available to all developers via AWS Builder ID with no AWS account required
Gotchas & Constraints
Gotcha #1: Q Developer's inline completions are generated in the cloud; code context is sent to AWS. Review your organisation's data handling policy before using on proprietary codebases; the Pro tier includes an enterprise data privacy agreement. Gotcha #2: Code transformation (Java upgrades) works best on Maven-based projects; Gradle support is more limited. Constraints: Security scans support Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Ruby, and Kotlin. Other languages receive chat and completions but not automated scanning.
A 35-person engineering team at a B2B SaaS company runs a Java 8 application on EC2. Java 8 reaches end of support and their security audit flags 47 known CVEs in the dependency tree tied to outdated libraries. Manually upgrading to Java 17 and updating all dependencies is estimated at 6 weeks of developer time with high regression risk. They enable Amazon Q Developer Pro for the team at $19 per developer per month ($665 per month total). A developer runs Q Developer's code transformation on the 180,000-line codebase from inside VS Code. Q Developer analyses the project, upgrades the Java version, updates 34 dependencies, rewrites 12 deprecated API calls, and generates a diff for review in 4 hours. The team reviews and merges the changes in 2 days. They then run a security scan, which surfaces 3 remaining medium-severity issues in custom code with exact line references and suggested patches, fixed the same afternoon.
The Result
Java 17 upgrade completed in 3 days instead of 6 weeks, 47 CVEs resolved, 3 custom code vulnerabilities found and patched before the next release, at a total cost of $665 for the month.