Amazon Q

Amazon Q is a family of generative AI-powered assistants from Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced on November 28, 2023, at the AWS re:Invent conference and made generally available on April 30, 2024.^[1][3] It splits into two primary products: Amazon Q Developer, a coding and cloud-operations assistant that absorbed and rebranded the former Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Amazon Q Business, an enterprise assistant that searches, summarizes, and acts across a company's internal data while respecting existing access permissions. Built on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q routes each request to an appropriate foundation model (including Claude models from Anthropic) rather than exposing model selection to the user.^[1][2]

At the launch, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky described Amazon Q as "a new type of generative AI powered assistant designed to work for you at work."^[1] Amazon Q Developer subscriptions start at $19 per user per month for the Pro tier, and Amazon Q Business at $20 per user per month for its Pro tier, both alongside free or low-cost entry tiers.^[8][9] In April 2025, the Amazon Q Developer agent scored 66% on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark and 49% on SWT-bench, ranking it among the top autonomous coding agents at the time.^[12]

History and Development

Origins and CodeWhisperer

Amazon Q Developer traces its roots to Amazon CodeWhisperer, a code-generation tool that AWS first previewed in June 2022 and made generally available in April 2023.^[5] CodeWhisperer provided real-time code suggestions in supported IDEs, similar in concept to GitHub Copilot. While CodeWhisperer offered a competitive free tier, it struggled to match the adoption momentum of Copilot, which had already secured over 1.8 million paying individual subscribers and tens of thousands of corporate customers by that time.^[5]

At re:Invent 2023, AWS introduced the Amazon Q brand as an umbrella for its generative AI assistants.^[1] The initial preview included Amazon Q in the AWS Management Console, Amazon Q for business use cases, and an expanded set of developer tools that went beyond what CodeWhisperer offered.^[20] Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, called the Amazon Q announcement the "most important" reveal at re:Invent 2023.^[21]

When did CodeWhisperer become Amazon Q Developer?

On April 30, 2024, AWS officially rebranded CodeWhisperer as part of Amazon Q Developer, consolidating all developer-facing AI capabilities under the Amazon Q name.^[5][6] According to AWS leadership, "CodeWhisperer is where we got started with code generation, but we really wanted to have a brand and name that fit a wider set of use cases."^[5] The rebrand coincided with the general availability (GA) launch of both Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Q Business, along with a preview of Amazon Q Apps.^[3][4]

All of CodeWhisperer's existing features carried over into Amazon Q Developer, including inline code suggestions, security scanning, and reference tracking.^[6] Q Developer expanded the scope significantly by adding autonomous agents for multi-step tasks, code transformation capabilities, infrastructure-as-code generation, and deep integration with the AWS console.^[3]

Amazon Q Developer

Amazon Q Developer is an AI-powered coding assistant designed to accelerate the entire software development lifecycle. It provides code generation, code review, debugging, security vulnerability scanning, application modernization, and infrastructure management capabilities.^[7]

Code Generation and Inline Suggestions

Amazon Q Developer generates real-time code suggestions ranging from single-line snippets to full functions. It supports over 25 programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.^[7] For infrastructure-as-code tasks, it also supports JSON, YAML, HCL (Terraform), AWS CloudFormation, and AWS CDK configurations.

Developers can describe features in natural language, and Amazon Q generates implementation plans spanning multiple files with complete code, tests, and API integrations.^[7] The system analyzes the entire project structure and workspace context to produce suggestions that align with existing code patterns and conventions.

What can the Amazon Q Developer Agent do?

The Amazon Q Developer Agent is an autonomous coding agent that can plan, implement, test, and iterate on software tasks with minimal human intervention.^[14] Introduced in its initial form in 2024 and significantly upgraded throughout 2025, the agent can:

• Break down complex feature requests into logical implementation steps
• Read and write files across a project
• Generate code diffs and run shell commands
• Execute compilers, package managers, and the AWS CLI
• Create and run unit tests
• Conduct code reviews to detect logical errors, anti-patterns, code duplication, and security vulnerabilities
• Generate documentation, data flow diagrams, and README files
• Propose multiple candidate solutions, evaluate them, and select the best one

In April 2025, AWS announced that the Amazon Q Developer Agent achieved a score of 66% on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark and 49% on SWT-bench, placing it among the top-ranked autonomous coding agents at the time.^[12] AWS stated the agent "achieves state-of-the-art performance" on SWT-bench Verified and "sits among the top ranking models" on SWE-bench Verified.^[12] The agent architecture uses a multi-path exploration approach, generating several candidate solutions for a given problem, selecting the most promising one, and backtracking when it reaches dead ends.^[14]

Code Transformation

Amazon Q Developer includes code transformation capabilities designed to modernize legacy applications.^[7] Key transformation features include:

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The Free Tier allows transformation of up to 1,000 lines of code per month per user, while the Pro Tier provides 4,000 lines of code per month per user, pooled at the account level.^[8]

Security Scanning

Amazon Q Developer offers built-in security scanning powered by thousands of security detectors across multiple programming languages.^[10][11] It provides three types of scanning:

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Detects vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, resource leaks, and log injection
• Secrets detection: Scans code and text files for hardcoded passwords, database connection strings, API keys, and usernames
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanning: Identifies misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security issues in IaC templates

The scanning runs in two modes. "Scan as you code" performs automatic background scanning in real time (Pro Tier only), while manual project scans are available in both the Free and Pro Tiers.^[11] Detected vulnerabilities include links to the relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries, and many detections offer one-click suggested code fixes directly within the IDE.^[10]

IDE and Platform Support

Amazon Q Developer integrates with a broad set of development environments and platforms:^[7]

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Console and Cloud Operations Features

Within the AWS Management Console, Amazon Q Developer can:

• Answer questions about AWS services, best practices, and architecture patterns
• Diagnose and troubleshoot AWS Console errors across all AWS Commercial regions
• Perform network troubleshooting by analyzing reachability between resources using natural language queries^[24]
• Generate Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK templates following AWS best practices
• Recommend optimal EC2 instance types based on workload characteristics
• Capture AWS console workflows and generate reusable production code (Console-to-Code)
• Visualize resource data in tables and cost data in charts through Amazon Q artifacts^[19]

GitHub Integration

In May 2025, AWS launched a preview of Amazon Q Developer in GitHub.^[15] This integration allows developers to assign GitHub issues to Amazon Q Developer using labels, after which the agent autonomously implements features, generates bug fixes, creates pull requests, and runs code reviews.^[15] The integration works with both GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise Cloud. No AWS account is required to get started with the free tier. In September 2025, AWS added interactive debugging for GitHub code reviews, allowing developers to have back-and-forth conversations with Amazon Q during pull request reviews.

Amazon Q Business

Amazon Q Business is a fully managed, generative AI-powered assistant designed for enterprise use.^[4] It enables employees to ask questions, get summaries, generate content, and complete tasks using their organization's internal data, while respecting existing access controls and permissions.

Enterprise Data Connectors

Amazon Q Business connects to over 40 enterprise data sources through pre-built connectors:^[18]

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All responses are permissions-aware, meaning that users only receive information they are authorized to access based on their existing identity and access management configurations.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Amazon Q Business uses retrieval-augmented generation to ground its responses in enterprise data. In August 2025, AWS launched Agentic RAG for Amazon Q Business, which significantly enhanced the system's ability to handle complex, multi-step queries.^[16][17] Key capabilities of Agentic RAG include:

• Analyzing both the user's question and conversation history for context-aware dialogue
• Breaking down complex queries into simpler sub-queries and executing them in parallel
• Invoking multiple data retrieval tools intelligently
• Asking disambiguating questions to clarify user intent
• Synthesizing information from various sources into comprehensive responses
• Using built-in AI agents that critique and validate responses, retrying retrievals if necessary
• Providing citations and showing users real-time progress

Amazon Q Apps

Amazon Q Apps, which reached general availability in July 2024, allows users to create lightweight generative AI applications from natural language descriptions without writing code.^[4] These apps can automate workflows and tasks by leveraging the same enterprise data sources connected to Amazon Q Business.

Integration with AWS Analytics

Amazon Q integrates with several AWS analytics and business intelligence services:

• Amazon Q in QuickSight: Provides natural language querying for business intelligence dashboards, allowing non-technical users to generate visualizations and reports
• Amazon Q in AWS Glue: Enables building data integration pipelines using natural language, reducing the need for deep Apache Spark or SQL expertise
• Amazon Q in Amazon Connect: Assists contact center agents with real-time recommendations and automated responses

How much does Amazon Q cost?

Amazon Q uses a per-user subscription model with different tiers for Developer and Business products. Amazon Q Developer offers a Free Tier and a Pro Tier at $19 per user per month, while Amazon Q Business offers a Lite tier at $3 per user per month and a Pro tier at $20 per user per month, plus usage-based index costs.^[8][9]

Amazon Q Developer Pricing

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Amazon Q Business Pricing

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Additional infrastructure costs apply for index units. A Starter Index costs $0.140 per hour per unit (maximum 5 units) and supports up to 20,000 documents or 200 MB of text in a single Availability Zone. An Enterprise Index costs $0.264 per hour per unit with multi-Availability Zone deployment for production workloads.^[9]

How does Amazon Q Developer compare with GitHub Copilot?

Amazon Q Developer competes with several other AI coding assistants in the market. Its primary differentiator is deep, native integration with AWS services, whereas GitHub Copilot leads on installed base and broad IDE coverage.

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GitHub Copilot holds roughly 42% market adoption and is used by 90% of Fortune 100 companies, giving it the largest installed base.^[23] Amazon Q Developer's primary differentiator is its deep integration with AWS services, making it particularly valuable for teams building on the AWS cloud. Claude Code excels at complex reasoning tasks and large-scale refactoring across multiple files, operating primarily as a terminal-based autonomous agent.

How does Amazon Q relate to Amazon Bedrock?

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that provides access to foundation models from multiple AI companies through a unified API. Amazon Q and Bedrock are complementary but serve different purposes:

• Amazon Bedrock gives developers API access to foundation models (including models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and Amazon) for building custom AI applications
• Amazon Q is a pre-built application layer that uses Bedrock's models internally to power its developer and business assistant features

Amazon Q Developer uses intelligent model routing through Bedrock to select the optimal foundation model for each task without exposing the selection logic to the end user. This means that as newer and more capable models become available on Bedrock, Amazon Q can incorporate them transparently. AWS has confirmed that Amazon Q leverages Claude models from Anthropic among its routing options.

For organizations that want fine-grained control over model selection, prompt engineering, and AI application behavior, Bedrock is the appropriate choice. For teams that want a turnkey AI assistant integrated into their existing development and business workflows, Amazon Q provides that experience without requiring direct model management.

2025 and 2026 Updates

Amazon Q has received frequent updates since its GA launch. Key milestones include:

2025

• February 2025: Amazon Q Developer expanded AWS Console error troubleshooting to all AWS Commercial regions, beyond the initial US East and US West coverage
• April 2025: Major update month for Amazon Q Developer, including the state-of-the-art SWE-bench Verified score of 66%, expanded multi-language support (adding Dart, Go, Kotlin, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Bash, PowerShell, CloudFormation, and Terraform to customizations), GitLab Duo integration reaching general availability, inline chat in Eclipse, and human language support for Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish^[13]
• May 2025: Preview launch of Amazon Q Developer in GitHub with automated feature implementation, code review, and legacy Java transformation within GitHub repositories^[15]
• August 2025: Agentic RAG launched for Amazon Q Business, enhancing multi-step query handling and response accuracy. Agentic coding chat capacity increased to 1,000 interactions per month for Pro Tier^[17]
• September 2025: Interactive debugging added for Amazon Q Developer in GitHub code reviews
• December 2025 (re:Invent 2025): AWS highlighted Amazon Q Developer's infrastructure-as-code generation capabilities and its role in agentic AI workflows. Amazon also introduced SWE-PolyBench, a multilingual benchmark for AI coding agents^[22]

2026

• February 2026: Amazon Q artifacts became generally available in the AWS Management Console, enabling generative AI-based visualization of resource data in tables and cost data in charts. The Q interface was also repositioned in the console navigation bar for easier access^[19]
• April 30, 2026 (end-of-support announcement): AWS announced that Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins and paid subscriptions will reach end of support on April 30, 2027, giving customers 12 months to migrate. New signups for Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins were blocked starting May 15, 2026. Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console and first-party AWS service integrations (including the Slack and Microsoft Teams chat apps) are not affected and remain available to AWS customers. AWS directed developers to migrate to Kiro, a new agentic IDE built from the ground up for spec-driven development.^[26] Starting May 29, 2026, Claude Opus 4.6 was removed from the Q Developer Pro model roster; the latest coding models are available exclusively through Kiro.^[26]
• Ongoing: Amazon Q Developer CLI users can upgrade to the Kiro CLI for access to additional features alongside Q Developer agentic functionality^[27]

Architecture and Security

Amazon Q is built on Amazon Bedrock with enterprise-grade security controls. Key architectural and security characteristics include:

• Data isolation: In the Pro Tier, AWS does not use customer content to train or improve the underlying models
• Access controls: Amazon Q Business respects existing IAM and identity provider configurations, ensuring users only see information they are authorized to access
• Encryption: Data is encrypted in transit and at rest
• Automated abuse detection: Built-in systems monitor for misuse
• Reference tracking: Amazon Q Developer can identify when generated code resembles training data and provide attribution to the original source, allowing organizations to suppress public code suggestions if desired
• Compliance: Amazon Q operates within AWS's shared responsibility model and inherits the compliance certifications of the underlying AWS infrastructure

What programming languages does Amazon Q Developer support?

Amazon Q Developer supports code suggestions and assistance in over 25 languages:^[7]

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For customizations (fine-tuning on internal codebases), support extends to Dart, Go, Kotlin, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Bash, PowerShell, CloudFormation, and Terraform, in addition to the core languages of Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Markdown, reStructuredText, and plain text.

See Also

• GitHub Copilot
• Amazon Bedrock
• Generative AI
• Large Language Models
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Claude

References

1. AWS. "Introducing Amazon Q, a new generative AI-powered assistant (preview)." AWS News Blog, November 28, 2023. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-q-a-new-generative-ai-powered-assistant-preview/ ↩
2. AWS. "AWS announces Amazon Q (Preview)." AWS What's New, November 28, 2023. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/11/aws-amazon-q-preview/ ↩
3. AWS. "Amazon Q Developer, now generally available, includes previews of new capabilities to reimagine developer experience." AWS News Blog, April 30, 2024. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-q-developer-now-generally-available-includes-new-capabilities-to-reimagine-developer-experience/ ↩
4. AWS. "Announcing the general availability of Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q Apps (Preview)." AWS What's New, April 30, 2024. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/04/general-availability-amazon-q-business-apps-preview/ ↩
5. TechCrunch. "Amazon CodeWhisperer is now called Q Developer and is expanding its functions." April 30, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/30/amazon-codewhisperer-is-now-called-q-developer-and-is-expanding-its-functions/ ↩
6. AWS. "Amazon Q Developer rename - Summary of changes." Amazon Q Developer Documentation. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/service-rename.html ↩
7. AWS. "AI for Software Development - Amazon Q Developer Features." https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/features/ ↩
8. AWS. "AI for Software Development - Amazon Q Developer Pricing." https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing/ ↩
9. AWS. "Amazon Q Business Pricing." https://aws.amazon.com/q/business/pricing/ ↩
10. AWS. "Code security scanning with Amazon Q Developer." AWS DevOps Blog. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/code-security-scanning-with-amazon-q-developer/ ↩
11. AWS. "Scanning your code with Amazon Q." Amazon Q Developer Documentation. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/security-scans.html ↩
12. AWS. "Amazon Q Developer releases state of the art agent for feature development." AWS What's New, April 2025. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/04/amazon-q-developer-releases-state-art-agent-feature-development/ ↩
13. AWS. "April 2025: A month of innovation for Amazon Q Developer." AWS DevOps Blog. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/april-2025-amazon-q-developer/ ↩
14. AWS. "Reinventing the Amazon Q Developer agent for software development." AWS DevOps Blog. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/reinventing-the-amazon-q-developer-agent-for-software-development/ ↩
15. AWS. "Amazon Q Developer in GitHub (in preview) accelerates code generation." AWS News Blog, May 2025. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-q-developer-in-github-now-in-preview-with-code-generation-review-and-legacy-transformation-capabilities/ ↩
16. AWS. "Bringing agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation to Amazon Q Business." AWS Machine Learning Blog, August 2025. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/bringing-agentic-retrieval-augmented-generation-to-amazon-q-business/ ↩
17. AWS. "Amazon Q Business launches Agentic RAG to enhance accuracy and explainability." AWS What's New, August 2025. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/08/qbusiness-launches-agentic-rag/ ↩
18. AWS. "Supported connectors - Amazon Q Business." Amazon Q Business Documentation. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qbusiness-ug/connectors-list.html ↩
19. AWS. "Amazon announces generative AI-based artifacts in Amazon Q Developer for visualizing resource and cost data." AWS What's New, February 2026. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/generative-ai-based-Amazon-Q-artifacts/ ↩
20. GeekWire. "AWS unveils 'Amazon Q' AI assistant, jabs at Microsoft and OpenAI at re:Invent." November 28, 2023. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/aws-unveils-amazon-q-ai-assistant-jabs-at-microsoft-and-openai-at-reinvent/ ↩
21. TechCrunch. "Amazon unveils Q, an AI-powered chatbot for businesses at AWS re:Invent." November 28, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/28/amazon-unveils-q-an-ai-powered-chatbot-for-businesses/ ↩
22. CloudThat. "AWS re:Invent 2025 Announces Amazon Q Developer Transforms Cloud Development." December 2025. https://www.cloudthat.com/resources/blog/aws-reinvent-2025-announces-amazon-q-developer-transforms-cloud-development/ ↩
23. Faros AI. "GitHub Copilot vs Amazon Q: Real Enterprise Bakeoff Results." https://www.faros.ai/blog/github-copilot-vs-amazon-q-enterprise-bakeoff ↩
24. AWS. "Introducing Amazon Q support for network troubleshooting (preview)." AWS Networking Blog. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/introducing-amazon-q-support-for-network-troubleshooting/ ↩
25. AWS. "Amazon Q Developer end-of-support announcement." AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog, April 30, 2026. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-end-of-support-announcement/ ↩
26. Kiro. "Migrating from Amazon Q Developer." Kiro Documentation. https://kiro.dev/docs/migrating-from-q-developer/ ↩