Amazon has pulled the plug on CodeWhisperer, which has been incorporated into its Q Developer product, announced at November’s re:Invent as part of an AI-powered AWS enterprise suite called Amazon Q, which also includes Q Business. Both Q Developer, which enables natural language coding, and Q Business, a data-driven productivity tool are now in general release, and Q Apps has just been added in preview, letting employees “build generative AI-powered apps from their company’s data, without any prior coding experience.” The move comes as Amazon seeks to gain ground on the Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding products.

“CodeWhisperer is where we got started [with code generation], but we really wanted to have a brand — and name — that fit a wider set of use cases,” AWS GM and Director of AI Developer Experiences Doug Seven tells TechCrunch, describing Q Developer as “the evolution of CodeWhisperer into something that’s much more broad.”

“On the software development side, Q doesn’t just generate code, it also tests code, debugs coding conflicts, and transforms code from one form to another,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy writes in a LinkedIn post that claims “developers can save months using Q to move from older versions of Java to newer, more secure and capable ones.”

Amazon’s Q news follows the recent announcement that the competing developer tool GitHub Workspace is available in general preview. TechCrunch reports the earlier AI-powered tool, GitHub Copilot, has already amassed “tens of thousands” of enterprise customers and more than 1.8 million individual users as paid subscribers.

Like GitHub Copilot, GitHub Workspace is powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, in which Microsoft is an investor.

“Even with a free tier, CodeWhisperer struggled to match the momentum of chief rival GitHub Copilot,” TechCrunch notes, characterizing it as “a bit of a branding fail.”

As with GitHub Copilot, “customers can fine-tune Q Developer on their internal codebases to improve the relevancy of the tool’s programming recommendations,” TechCrunch writes (pointing out that option was also offered by the now-deprecated CodeWhisperer), “and, thanks to a capability called Agents, Q Developer can autonomously perform things like implementing features and documenting and refactoring (i.e. restructuring) code.”

“If you work at a company like Accenture, GitLab, GoDaddy, Sun Life, Traeger Grills, Toyota or Wiz, you now have access to a conversational generative AI assistant, a no-code tool to build gen AI apps and developer-specific applications that free up software engineers from more mundane tasks,” CNET writes of AWS clients’ access to Amazon Q.

Amazon Q also “brings its advanced generative AI technology” to Amazon QuickSight, AWS’s unified business intelligence service built for the cloud.

“With Amazon Q in QuickSight, customers get a generative BI assistant that allows business analysts to use natural language to build BI dashboards in minutes and easily create visualizations and complex calculations,” Amazon explains in a blog post.