Amazon Q Developer

What it does

Amazon Q Developer is an AI coding assistant built into the AWS ecosystem. It provides inline code completions, chat-based code generation, and — most distinctively — specialized agents for tasks like Java version upgrades, .NET modernization, and infrastructure-as-code generation. It works inside VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, and also appears in the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and documentation pages. The completions draw context from your open files and, for AWS-specific tasks, from your AWS environment — it understands your deployed services, IAM roles, and infrastructure configuration. Security scanning runs automatically, flagging vulnerabilities and suggesting fixes as you write code.

Who it's for

Amazon Q Developer makes the most sense for teams heavily invested in AWS. Cloud infrastructure engineers writing CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform for AWS will find the service-aware suggestions genuinely useful — it knows the correct property names, valid configurations, and IAM permission patterns without you having to look them up. Enterprise Java teams facing framework upgrades benefit from the modernization agent, which can automate the tedious parts of moving from Java 8 to 17 or from older Spring versions. For general-purpose coding — a React frontend, a Python data pipeline, a Go microservice — Q Developer's completions are adequate but not competitive with Copilot or Cursor. If your work is not primarily AWS-focused, this tool offers limited advantage.

AWS-specific capabilities

Where Q Developer justifies its existence is AWS-native functionality. Ask it to write a Lambda function that reads from DynamoDB and publishes to SNS, and it produces code with correct client initialization, proper error handling, and appropriate IAM policy suggestions. The infrastructure code generation understands service quotas, region availability, and configuration best practices. The Java modernization agent can analyze a legacy Java application and produce a plan to upgrade dependencies, replace deprecated APIs, and update test suites — a task that would take a team weeks to do manually. These capabilities are not gimmicks; they address real pain points for AWS shops. The gap between Q Developer and competitors shrinks significantly when you are specifically working within the AWS ecosystem.

The bottom line

Amazon Q Developer is a specialized tool with a narrow but genuine value proposition. For AWS-centric teams, the integration depth, security scanning, and modernization agents provide capabilities that no general-purpose AI coding assistant can match. For everyone else, the general coding experience does not justify choosing it over Copilot or Cursor. The free tier is worth trying if you do significant AWS work. The $19 per user per month Pro tier is reasonable for teams that will actually use the AWS-specific features. Think of it as an AWS productivity tool that happens to include a coding assistant, not the other way around.