Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added support for Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish to the generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents it makes available for application developers.
Expanded language capabilities are now available in both the integrated development environment (IDE) and command line interface (CLI) for Amazon Q Developer, with support coming to the AWS Management Console soon.
Srini Iragavarapu, director of generative AI applications and experiences for AWS, said these extensions to Amazon Q Developer will enable developers around the world to leverage generative AI technologies to not only be more productive but also collaborate more effectively.
For example, comments and documentation that might have originally been made in English can be converted to another language to help ensure they are well understood, he added.
That capability will make it easier for organizations that have application development teams distributed around the world to bridge cultural divides, noted Iragavarapu. In effect, it helps democratize software development as it becomes easier for teams of developers around the world to share ideas, he added.
It’s not clear what impact generative AI might have on the way software is built around the world, but with more organizations than ever relying on highly distributed teams of developers to build software, the need to improve communication is a pressing concern. For example, it’s not uncommon for intentions to be misconstrued simply because one member of those teams might not have understood an idiom commonly used in one language but not another.
AWS has been working toward integrating the AI agents it is making, via alliances with partners such as GitLab, to enable DevOps teams to employ AI agents across the entire software development lifecycle, including making it easier to convert code from one programming language to another.
Exactly how much AI agents are now being used to build software is unclear, but a Futurum Research survey finds 41% of respondents now expect generative AI tools and platforms will be used to generate, review and test code. The one thing that is certain is that the volume of code being created is going to continue to increase exponentially in the months and years ahead as AI agents are integrated into software engineering workflows.
Each organization will, of course, need to determine for itself to what degree to rely on AI agents to build and deploy applications. The quality of the code being generated by AI tools can vary widely, and in many instances, organizations are hesitant to deploy code in production environments unless a human developer thoroughly understands how it was constructed.
Regardless of how code is constructed, demand for applications that address ever-widening use cases appears insatiable. In theory, the backlog of application development projects should start to decrease as application developers of all skill levels become more productive. The challenge and the opportunity now is ensuring best practices for developing software are maintained, no matter who or what is actually writing the code.
