Amazon Q Developer

What Is Amazon Q Developer?

Amazon Q Developer is AWS's generative AI assistant for software development, formerly known as Amazon CodeWhisperer. AWS says CodeWhisperer became part of Amazon Q Developer on April 30, 2024, with its features moving into the newer product. It runs in code editors, the AWS Management Console, the command line, and chat applications such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, and AWS says it is built on Amazon Bedrock.

What It's Good For

Amazon Q Developer covers a wide range of everyday development work:

• Code suggestions and chat: AWS describes suggestions that range from snippets to full functions based on your comments and existing code, inline chat in the editor, and command-line completions with natural-language-to-bash translation. AWS lists support for over 25 languages, including Java, Python and JavaScript.
• Agentic coding: The agentic experience can break a prompt into implementation steps and generate code, tests and API integrations, working from your workspace structure.
• AWS expertise: In the AWS Management Console, Teams and Slack, AWS says it helps optimize cloud costs and resources, give architecture guidance, investigate operational incidents and diagnose networking problems.
• Security scanning: AWS says it scans for hard-to-detect vulnerabilities such as exposed credentials and log injection, and suggests remediations you can accept with a click.
• Code transformation: AWS says its agents help port .NET applications from Windows to Linux and upgrade Java versions.
• Customization: It can be connected to private repositories so that suggestions and chat answers reflect your internal libraries, APIs and best practices.

Who It's a Good Fit For

Amazon Q Developer is the strongest fit for teams that build on AWS. Its AWS knowledge, console integration and chat integrations are aimed at running applications on AWS as much as writing them, and customization suits enterprises with proprietary codebases. Individual developers can start on the free tier, and AWS also sells a Pro tier with expanded limits.

Teams evaluating AI coding assistants will also want to compare general-purpose options such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which are not tied to one cloud.

Limitations and Where It Falls Short

The most important constraint is the roadmap for IDE users. According to AWS documentation, AWS will discontinue support for Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins on April 30, 2027. For similar capabilities AWS points users to Kiro, which it describes as offering the latest models and features, including agentic coding, chat and MCP support, and its migration guidance says inline suggestions, chat and code generation are available there. Anyone choosing Amazon Q Developer today for work inside an IDE should plan for that move. The notice names the IDE plugins specifically.

Its deepest strengths are tied to AWS services, so developers who work outside the AWS ecosystem may find general-purpose assistants more useful. The free tier has lower limits than the Pro tier, so heavy users should compare the two before committing.

Comparing it with GitHub Copilot? See our GitHub Copilot vs CodeWhisperer comparison, written when the product was still called CodeWhisperer.