NAB starts tailoring the output of its AI pair-programming

NAB is expecting to triple the number of engineers using the AI pair-programming service Amazon Q Developer in FY25, with it playing an increasing role in application modernisation projects.

NAB's Paul Roney.

The bank has been steadily increasing its internal user base for Q Developer - formerly CodeWhisperer - growing from an initial 30 or so users in a sandboxed proof-of-concept, to 70 developers in non-prod, to 450 and then 1000 working in production environments by late June.

Speaking at AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas, core platforms executive Paul Roney said a further expansion is now underway.

“We’ll look to go to about 2800-3000 [engineers] later this [financial] year,” Roney said, with an accompanying slide confirming the timeline as FY25.

Roney revealed that NAB is making use of a feature of Q Developer still officially in preview - customisations.

“With customisations, Amazon Q Developer can assist with software development in ways that conform to your team's internal libraries, proprietary algorithmic techniques, and enterprise code style,” AWS notes in its technical documentation.

“An Amazon Q customisation is a set of elements that enables Amazon Q to provide you with suggestions based on your company's codebase. 

“You connect a data source that contains your codebase, and Amazon Q uses your content to provide assistance that caters to the style of your organisation's developers.”

“At NAB, in preview, we’ve been using customisations in a couple of areas, and the areas where we’ve focused on are where we use frameworks,” Roney said.

“We do a lot of building of apps because we’re 84 percent in cloud, so the frameworks that we use to build mini applications and build services at NAB are the two areas where we really started using customisations in preview.

“What we’ve really looked for is the best reference instantiations of that, and the best repos to serve that back to the rest of the developers who are building those applications and services, if that makes sense.

“So, we’ve probably tried to pick the best of the repos, instantiations and frameworks with a broad user base where it could have an impact across a large set of developers.”

In addition to broadening its use of customisations, Roney also said the bank has used a capability in Q Developer to upgrade Java-based applications to new language versions.

“We’ve used some code transform for a couple of Java 8 to Java 17 examples of upgrades thus far,” he said.

Roney added that NAB is interested in new capabilities and previews added to Q Developer at re:Invent this week.

Among capabilities added are ways to generate documentation, code reviews, and unit tests; as well as previews of AI assistance when transforming .NET, mainframe, and VMware workloads, and of an assistance capability to troubleshoot operational issues with software.

“We’re looking forward to the features and all the announcements that were made today, looking at things like operations, as well as some of the other language announcements that were made,” Roney said.

Ry Crozier is attending AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas as a guest of AWS