Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a preview for its agentic artificial intelligence software development assistant Q Developer for Microsoft Corp.’s open-source code repository GitHub.

Millions of developers use GitHub daily to store vast amounts of source code for software projects as a platform for collaboration, version control and code management. The platform surpassed 150 million users in late 2024. GitHub provides numerous tools that allow developers to build, maintain and contribute to both public and private software projects.

Amazon Q Developer is now available in the GitHub Marketplace, where the AI agent preview can be configured to access a developer repository.

Once installed, it will provide AI-powered capabilities including feature development, code review and Java code migration directly within the GitHub interface.

Q Developer is a powerful AI agent that will behave like a teammate, helping automate tedious tasks. Developers can assign issues to it such as feature requests, and it will then generate code using the whole codebase in the GitHub repository by following the description in the request.

“Using Amazon Q Developer in GitHub is like having a full-stack developer that you can collaborate with to develop new features, accelerate the code review process and rely on to enhance the security posture and quality of your code,” said Matheus Guimaraes, senior developer advocate at AWS.

For example, a collaborator might assign a GitHub issue requesting to “implement image upload functionality for profiles.” Developers will need to describe all the requirements of the functionality accurately and as clearly as possible so the AI agent in the GitHub issue so the agent can follow along and produce code as close to their vision.

Once assigned, Q Developer will get to work and automatically update the code repository with the changes. It will do all this behind the scenes and the amount of time it takes will depend on the complexity of the request.

Of course, Q will do some automatic checks on the generated code to make sure it is syntactically sound and uses GitHub Actions to automatically perform security vulnerability scans and code quality checks. It will also use its own feedback to improve the code.

These code reviews can be useful for automatically generated code, or manual code when requested. In the image upload development example, Q might flag a warning about a missing authorization request that could allow direct access to the public.

Since this is a serious security issue, the risk will be explained in simple terms with recommendations for fixes accompanied by code samples. Q Developer might also suggest patches from industry best practices that the developer could review and accept, allowing the developer to easily just click and move on.

Easy migration for legacy codebases

Many companies and developers are still working on older versions of programming languages such as Java for their applications such as Java 8 or Java 11, but need a more current long-term version like Java 17.

That means they lack access to the most recent, up-to-date features and capabilities, and they need to modernize their applications for upcoming devices and to support new software. To avoid falling behind, developers need to migrate their codebases. This process can be extremely time-consuming because it requires massive search and replace sessions, which can often break large portions of an application and lead to hundreds of hours of work.

Q Developer makes this easy by allowing developers to assign a GitHub issue called “Migration” and then assign it to the Amazon Q transform agent. It will then handle all of the migration from the earlier version of Java to the newest.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer