Amazon is touting its Amazon Q Developer, saying it can greatly increase programmers’ productivity over the “one hour per day” currently spent writing code.

Amazon Q Developer is the company’s tool that’s designed to improve programmers’ productivity by handling much of the extraneous tasks programmers are often saddled with, such as code reviews, unit testing, and writing documentation.

In fact, Amazon says these extraneous tasks take so much time that most developers only code an hour a day.

Today, developers report they spend an average of just one hour per day coding. They spend most of their time on tedious, undifferentiated tasks such as learning codebases, writing and reviewing documentation, testing, managing deployments, troubleshooting issues or finding and fixing vulnerabilities. Q Developer is a generative AI-powered assistant for designing, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining software. Its agents for software development have a deep understanding of your entire code repos, so they can accelerate many tasks beyond coding. With this new capability, Q Developer can help you understand your existing code bases faster, or quickly document new features, so you can focus on shipping features for your customers.

Amazon Q Developer was became generally available in April, with the company continuing to improve it and add features in the ensuing months.

Amazon Q Developer has agents that can generate real-time code suggestions based on your comments and existing code, bootstrap new projects from a single prompt (/dev), automate the process of upgrading and transforming legacy Java applications with the Amazon Q Developer transformation capability (/transform), generate customized code recommendations from your private repositories securely, and quickly understand what resources are running in your AWS account with a simple prompt.

As of early December, Amazon Q Developer can now provide enhanced codebase documentation, improved code reviews, and automatic unit tests.

Today, we’re expanding Amazon Q Developer agent capabilities for: 1) enhanced documentation in codebases (/doc), 2) supporting code reviews to detect and resolve security and code quality issues (/review), and 3) generating unit tests automatically and improving test coverage (/test) across the software development lifecycle in your preferred IDE or GitLab Duo with Amazon Q (in preview), which is one of the most popular enterprise DevOps platforms.

Developers can learn more and get started with Amazon Q Developer here.