Daily Tips to supercharge your Amazon Q Developer experience

The importance of building muscle memory

When I talk to developers about the use of AI coding assistants, one of the key takeaways is that daily habits are one of the most effective tools in helping to build muscle memory and explore new possibilities that these tools provide.

To help folk with this, over the next few weeks I am going to share daily hints and tips that I have found useful and made my use of Amazon Q Developer more effective. If you can follow with me on this journey, I hope that some of you will start to form your own daily habits and even share your own hints and tips that worked for you.

Each day I will share something new tip, categorised against a few themes and topics. If you have your own tips, or your own experiences with tips I share, please use the comment feature or feel free to contact me directly.

Right, enough of the preamble, lets get started with those tips…

Tip 1 - Setting yourself up for success: Keep up to date with the latest Amazon Q Developer plugin

During the installation of the Amazon Q Developer plugin in VSCode, there is a button to auto-update which by default might be un-ticked.

Typically you might keep it that way, wanting to ensure you have control over updates to your machine. However, when it comes to the Amazon Q Developer plugin, it makes sense to tick this box and enable the auto update. Why? The plugin is being updated so frequently that it is simpler and less work to get VSCode to do the updating for you.

You can actually see what I mean by checking the release notes of the VSCode plugin. The team are releasing frequently, adding improvements as well as addressing issues that are reported. When software is being updated as frequently as this, I find it easier to keep the auto-update enabled to make my life easier.

Amazon Q Developer Changelog Another helpful resource to see what the latest news or updates about the Amazon Q Developer plugin is the official Amazon Q Developer change log page and the AWS Developer Centre.

That’s it for this tip, but keep posted for a new tip that I will publish tomorrow. Until then, happy coding with Amazon Q!