AWS announces workspace context awareness for Amazon Q Developer chat

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the release of workspace context awareness in Amazon Q Developer chat. By including @workspace in your prompt, Amazon Q Developer will automatically ingest and index all code files, configurations, and project structure, giving the chat comprehensive context across your entire application within the integrated development environment (IDE).

Throughout the software development lifecycle, developers, and IT professionals face challenges in understanding, creating, troubleshooting, and modernizing complex applications. Amazon Q Developer’s workspace context enhances its ability to address these issues by providing a comprehensive understanding of the entire codebase. During the planning phase, it enables gaining insights into the overall architecture, dependencies, and coding patterns, facilitating more complete and accurate responses and descriptions. When writing code, workspace awareness allows Amazon Q Developer to suggest code and solutions that require context from different areas without constant file switching. For troubleshooting, deeper contextual understanding aids in comprehending how various components interact, accelerating root cause analysis. By learning about the collection of files and folders in your workspace, Amazon Q Developer delivers accurate and relevant responses, tailored to the specific codebase, streamlining development efforts across the entire software lifecycle.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• How @workspace works
• How to use @workspace to:
  • Understand your projects and code
  • Navigate your project using natural language descriptions
  • Generate code and solutions that demonstrate workspace awareness
• How to get started

Our goal is for you to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the @workspace context will increase developer productivity and accuracy of Amazon Q Developer responses.

How @workspace works

Amazon Q Developer chat now utilizes advanced machine learning in the client to provide a comprehensive understanding of your codebase within the integrated development environment (IDE).

The key processes are:

• Local Workspace Indexing: When enabled, Amazon Q Developer will index programming files or configuration files in your project upon triggering with @workspace for the first time. Non-essential files like binaries and those specified in .gitignore are intelligently filtered out during this process, focusing only on relevant code assets. This indexing takes approximately 5–20 minutes for workspace sizes up to 200 MB.
• Persisted and Auto-Refreshed Index: The created index is persisted to disk, allowing fast loading on subsequent openings of the same workspace. If the index is over 24 hours old, it is automatically refreshed by re-indexing all files.
• Memory-Aware Indexing: To prevent resource overhead, indexing stops at either a hard limit on size or when available system memory reaches a minimum threshold.
• Continuous Updates: After initial indexing, the index is incrementally updated whenever you finish editing files in the IDE by closing the file or moving to another tab.

By creating and maintaining a comprehensive index of your codebase, Amazon Q Developer is empowered with workspace context awareness, enabling rich, project-wide assistance tailored to your development needs. When responding to chat requests, instructions, and questions, Amazon Q Developer can now use its knowledge of the rest of the workspace to augment the context of the currently open files.

Let’s see how @workspace can help!

Customer Use-Cases

Onboarding and Knowledge Sharing

You can quickly get up to speed on implementation details by asking questions like What are the key classes with application logic in this @workspace?

You can ask other discovery questions about how code works: Does this application authenticate players prior to starting a game? @workspace

You can then follow up with documentation requests: Can you document, using markdown, the workflow in this @workspace to start a game?

Project-Wide Code Discovery and Understanding

You can understand how a function or class is used across the workspace by asking: How does this application validate the guessed word’s correctness? @workspace

You can then ask about how this is communicated to the player: @workspace How are the results of this validation rendered to the web page?

Code Generation with Multi-File Context

You can also generate tests, new features, or extend functionality while leveraging context from other project files with prompts like @workspace Find the class that generates the random words and create a unit test for it.

Project-Wide Analysis and Remediation

Create data flow diagrams that require application workflow knowledge with @workspace Can you provide a UML diagram of the data flow between the front-end and the back-end? Using your built-in UML Previewer you can view the resulting diagram.

With @workspace, Amazon Q Developer chat becomes deeply aware of workspace’s unique code, enabling efficient development, maintenance, and knowledge sharing.

Getting Started

Enabling the powerful workspace context capability in Amazon Q Developer chat is straightforward. Here’s how to get started:

1. Open Your Project in the IDE: Launch your integrated development environment (IDE) and open the workspace or project you want the Amazon Q to understand.
2. Start a New Chat Session: Start a new chat session within the Amazon Q Developer chat panel if not already open.
3. “Enable” Workspace Context :To activate the project-wide context, simply include @workspace in the prompt. For example: How does the authentication flow work in this @workspace? When enabled, the first time Amazon Q Developer sees the @workspace keyword for the current workspace, Amazon Q Developer will ingest and analyze the code, configuration, and structure of the project.
   1. If not already enabled, Amazon Q Developer will instruct you to do so.
   2. Select the check the box for Amazon Q: Local Workspace Index
4. Try Different Query Types: With @workspace context, you can ask a wide range of questions and provide instructions that leverage the full project context:
   1. Where is the business logic to handle users in this @workspace?
   2. @workspace Explain the data flow between the frontend and backend.
   3. Add new API tests using the existing test utilities found in the @workspace.
5. Iterate and Refine: Try rephrasing your query or explicitly including more context by selecting code or mentioning specific files when the response doesn’t meet your expectations. The more relevant information you provide, the better Amazon Q Developer can understand your intent. For optimal results using workspace context, it’s recommended to use specific terminology present in your codebase, avoid overly broad queries, and leverage available examples, references, and code snippets to steer Amazon Q Developer effectively.

Conclusion

In this post we introduced Amazon Q Developer’s workspace awareness in chat via the @workspace keyword, highlighting the benefits of using workspace when understanding code, responding to questions, and generating new code. By allowing Amazon Q Developer to analyze and understand your project structure, workspace context unlocks new possibilities for development productivity gains.

If you are new to Amazon Q Developer, I highly recommend you check out Amazon Q Developer documentation and the Q-Words workshop.

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