Best practices for onboarding Amazon Q Developer
Amazon Q Developer is a powerful generative AI coding assistant that is available through popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains. This section focuses on best practices for accessing and onboarding Amazon Q Developer to your coding development environment.
Prerequisites for Amazon Q Developer
Amazon Q Developer is available as part of the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains (for example, IntelliJ and PyCharm). For Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs, Amazon Q Developer supports Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.
For detailed instructions on installing the AWS Toolkit for both Visual Studio Code and a JetBrains IDE, see Installing the Amazon Q Developer extension or plugin in your IDE in the Amazon Q Developer User Guide.
Best practices when using Amazon Q Developer
General best practices when using Amazon Q Developer include the following:
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Provide relevant context to get more accurate responses, like programming languages, frameworks, and tools that are in use. Break down complex problems into smaller components.
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Experiment and iterate on your prompts and questions. Programming often involves trying different approaches.
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Always review code suggestions before you accept them, and edit as needed to make sure that they do exactly what you intended.
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Use the customization capability to make Amazon Q Developer aware of your internal libraries, APIs, best practices, and architectural patterns for more relevant recommendations.
Data privacy and content usage in Amazon Q Developer
When deciding to use Amazon Q Developer, you should understand how your data and content are used. Following are key points:
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For Amazon Q Developer Pro users, your code content is not used for service improvement or model training.
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For Amazon Q Developer Free Tier users, you can opt out of having your content used for service improvement through IDE settings or AWS Organizations policies.
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Transmitted content is encrypted, and any stored content is secured with encryption at rest and access controls. For more information, see Data encryption in Amazon Q Developer in the Amazon Q Developer User Guide.
