Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Web Services Inc.’s artificial intelligence software development assistant, today announced support for inline chat that combines the ability to invoke assistants within software editors and update code, enabling developers to describe their needs directly and receive responses.

Many AI software development tools work as inline code completion and as chat tools in the sidebar. Inline code completion acts by showing suggestions as developers type allowing them to simply accept or reject as they go, saving time. The chat interface helps generate code from developer prompts, but also explains why, as well as assists with improving code, including refactoring or generating tests and documentation.

Inline chat allows developers to invoke a chat interface directly within their coding editor and talk to the AI assistant to tell it what they want to do. For example, they can tell it that they want to improve a segment of code directly in place. The benefit is that instead of having to use a sidebar chat interface they can merge the suggestion immediately, rather than copy/paste the changes.

“This new capability is ideal for editing an existing file to fix issues, optimize code, refactor code and add comments,” said Yose Yapir, a senior developer advocate at AWS. “Inline chat is really powerful and helps me do more complex things quickly and accurately.”

Under the hood, Q Developer is built on Amazon Bedrock, the company’s managed service for building AI applications and customizable high-performance foundation models, including those from Amazon and other leading AI companies. To provide the best experience for developers, Amazon said the inline chat is powered by the latest version of Anthropic PBC’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which launched a week ago.

The newest version of Sonnet is one of the best-performing AI models on coding charts, exhibiting wide-ranging improvements for industry benchmarks. It is currently the top model on the SWE-bench chart, solving 49% of the verified dataset, which is 500 real-world GitHub issues.

“By powering the new inline chat capability with this cutting-edge Anthropic model, Amazon Q Developer is delivering an AI assistant that can help you save time while tackling your most complex coding challenges with unparalleled capabilities,” Yapir said.

Using the new inline chat is designed to be simple, rather similar to involving another developer in the process. Developers need only select a code segment and invoke Q Developer using ⌘ + I on Mac or Ctrl + I on Windows.

A small chat interface will appear in the editor where the developer can type a prompt, such as “Add documentation including description throughout the code.” The assistant will then analyze the code and create the appropriate comments in the code.

Once it’s completed, the user can review the work of the AI assistant and accept or reject the changes. In most cases, it will create a comment block at the beginning of the code documenting the software, to explain how it functions, and then place inline elements to explain anything that might need additional attention.

Although it’s possible to generate documentation using a chat interface, it would force the user to copy and paste each comment block manually and laboriously. This makes it easy and simple, AWS says.

The AI-assisted inline chat capabilities are available for Microsoft Corp.’s Visual Studio Code and JetBrains s.r.o. independent development environments. Developers can access the new feature through Amazon Q Developer’s Free tier.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer, AWS