Amazon Q Developer Tips: 25 tips to supercharge your development

Tip 25 - Tips to help you get the most out of Amazon Q Developer

Over the past weeks I have shared daily tips on how you can get the best out of AI coding assistants like Amazon Q Developer. Over the festive period some of you may find yourself with some free time, or perhaps you are going to be setting yourself some new years resolutions. For those that are planning on building new projects, or perhaps wanting to learn something new, then I hope this set of tips and tricks will help you towards that goal.

To make it easier for you to browse these tips, I have put together the complete list for your reference. Bookmark this page and check out the tips n tricks as and when they might be useful. As always, respond in the comments or drop me a message if you have tips that you would like me to add.

Amazon Q Developer Tips n Tricks

Here is the complete list of my tips and tricks.

1. Set the Amazon Q Developer plugin to auto update
2. Reconfigure your IDE layout
3. Enable Amazon Q Developer Workspace Index
4. No AWS Account needed - claim your Builder ID
5. Break down large problems into smaller tasks
6. Exploring use cases for using Amazon Q Developer
7. Generate better prompts
8. Understanding "context" in Amazon Q Developer
9. Using import statements as context
10. Personalising Amazon Q's output using Amazon Q Developer Workspace Index
11. Using scaffolding to provide consistent output
12. Mastering in-line prompts
13. Generating perfect functions
14. Prompt history using up and down arrows
15. CHat Orientated Programming (CHOP)
16. How to tackle LLM training data cutoff
17. Choose the right Amazon Q Developer tool
18. Working with Agents - /dev
19. Working with Agents - /doc
20. Working with Agents - /review
21. Working with Agents - /test
22. Keyboard shortcuts
23. Debugging tips and tricks
24. Further reading and resources

Thanks to

These tips borrow heavily from work that other developers and builders have shared, so I would love to acknowledge folks like AWS Community Builder Christian Bonzelet, AWS Hero Matt Lewis, and Massimo Re Ferre for all the excellent content they put together and share.

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Hopefully these tips will help you accelerate your understanding and use of Amazon Q Developer. Remember that regular use will generate muscle memory in effective use of these tools. They might not be suitable for everything we do as developers, when they are a very powerful tool when used appropriately.

Moving fast! One thing to remember is that these tips are a moment in time, in an area that is moving super fast. I will review and update these as things change.

Amazon Q Developer IDE cheat-sheet

Massimo Re Ferre has put together the ultimate Amazon Q Developer cheat sheet which you can access here. It provides a useful overview of all the Amazon Q Developer tools together with information such as context availability, supported languages, links to documentation and more.

Beyond development

In this series of tips I have explored just the Amazon Q Developer from within the IDE. Amazon Q Developer provides developers much more capability beyond the editor. You can use it within the command line, from within the AWS console, within specific AWS services, and more.

Amazon Q Developer is not just for Christmas - its a new way of working. I hope that these tips have been useful and that they inspire some of you to try it out over the festive period.

Try Amazon Q Developer today, and claim your free Builder ID

You can try Amazon Q Developer for free today, by signing up for a Builder ID. You can also check out my other posts on community.aws, as I have been sharing a lot of tips and use cases of how I am using Amazon Q Developer. You can also keep up to date with all the new features and improvements of Amazon Q Developer by checking out the changelog.

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