As hinted above, there are special considerations for coding agents, beyond just training them on code. They need to be able to work with software repositories, understand entire projects, understand house styles, write unit tests (and, optionally, the other dozen or so kinds of tests), find the appropriate place to add new code, run code, test code, debug code, revise code based on testing, write commit messages, check in working code, generate pull requests, and so on.
There’s also a need for coding agents to allow humans to approve or disapprove proposed changes to the code base.
Amazon Q Developer
Last fall, Amazon Q Developer supported two agents, one for generating code (/dev) and one for transforming older Java projects to an updated Java version (/transform). In December 2024, Amazon added three more agents, one for generating documentation in code bases (/doc), one for performing code reviews to detect and resolve security and code quality issues (/review), and one for generating unit tests automatically and improving test coverage (/test).
