News

Amazon Q Developer Gets Inline AI Chat

• By David Ramel
• 10/30/2024

Playing catch-up to some other AI coding assistants, Amazon Q Developer now offers inline chat capabilities, powered by its latest/greatest AI tech: the Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet update.

Inline chat is being added to Amazon Q Developer extensions for Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor and JetBrains IDEs.

It provides functionality including:

• Seamless Code Integration: Inline chat allows AI-generated responses to be directly merged into the existing code, eliminating the need to copy and paste from a separate chat window.

• Enhanced Contextual Assistance: Developers can describe issues or ideas directly in the code editor, and the AI provides responses that are contextually integrated into the codebase.
• Improved Workflow: Ideal for editing existing files to fix issues, optimize code, refactor, and add comments, streamlining the development process.
• Powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet: The new feature leverages the latest version of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, enhancing the AI's coding capabilities.

You can read more about the latter in our article, "AWS Ups Its Agentic AI Game with Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet Update."

The JetBrains extension has been downloaded more than 941,000 times, while the VS Code tool shows more than 453,000 installs.

"With inline chat support, powered by the latest version of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Q Developer generates and displays an inline diff (set of code changes) view based on the prompt in real time, making it easy to understand and evaluate suggestions directly from your code editor," AWS said in an announcement. "You can then use keyboard shortcuts to review and accept changes without needing to switch context between different chat panels in your IDE. This allows you to efficiently complete tasks, improving and streamlining the development process."

Meanwhile, Jose Yapur provided a take on the new functionality framed in his personal journey, which started with the tool's predecessor, CodeWhisperer.

"I have been using both inline suggestions and chat for the past year equally," Yapur said. "While I love both options, I still felt there was room for improvement. For example, when fixing a bug, inline suggestions excel at generating new code, but do not easily allow me to update the existing code. Chat allows me to update existing code, but the response is provided in the chat window rather than being directly integrated into my code. This is where inline chat aims to improve the workflow."

Amazon is seen by many in the industry as being behind fellow cloud giant Microsoft in the AI-assisted coding space, thanks to partnering with OpenAI for tools like Microsoft Copilot and GitHub Copilot, which both provided initial chat functionality last year, though some new chat features were just rolled out by GitHub Copilot earlier this year and even as late as last month.

Inline chat support is available within the VS Code and JetBrains IDEs and in all AWS regions where Q Developer is available, the company said.