Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a partnership with DevSecOps tooling provider GitLab Inc. that will integrate it with agentic artificial intelligence development assistant Q Developer.

GitLab provides a comprehensive web-based platform for software development and DevOps that includes version control, collaboration, continuous integration and continuous delivery, project management and security scanning tools. It operates as an all-in-one platform with a full suite of tools for every stage of software development.

AWS will provide Q Developer’s powerful AI agents with GitLab Duo, GitLab’s suite of AI-powered features integrated into the platform. Duo provides code completion, explanation and chat. This integration will help accelerate software development and complex multi-step tasks by reducing switching between applications.

“The thing people want out of AI tooling is that they don’t use it for bits and pieces of it,” Deepak Singh, vice president of developer agents and experiences at AWS, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “They want it to impact the entire workflow and have an impact across the workflow, which is partly what makes this super-compelling.”

Q Developer’s agents work across the entire software lifecycle and allow developers to allocate complex tasks such as quality assurance, package upgrades or security vulnerability fixes. They can transform entire repositories, conduct code reviews and optimize code automatically. The objective is to reduce manual work and tedium for software engineers, allowing developers to focus on more strategic tasks.

As the agents have full access to repository context, user stories and issues, they can provide intelligent and relevant code suggestions.

“You can make Q part of your team and assign tasks to it,” Singh said. “It’s been pretty clear coming from our customers that this is what they want. It’s autonomous agents as team members.”

For example, refactoring code and modernizing a legacy codebase is often a challenging and time-consuming task, sometimes requiring weeks or even months of developer effort. A Q Developer agent can be assigned to assist with bringing a Java 8 or 11 codebase up to a more current version by creating a comprehensive upgrade plan and generating fully documented merge requests with an audit trail.

“Participating in the early access program for GitLab Duo with Amazon Q has given us a glimpse into its transformative potential for our development workflows,” said Osmar Alonso, DevOps engineer at Volkswagen Digital Solutions Inc. “Even in its early stages, we saw how the deeper integration with autonomous agents could streamline our process, from code commit to production.”

GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is now generally available today as a bundle for GitLab Ultimate self-managed customers on AWS.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer