AWS says ‘frontier agents’ are here – and they’re going to transform software development

AWS has unveiled a set of powerful new “frontier agents” , which the hyperscaler said marks a step change in the potential of agentic AI technology and the automation of far more complex tasks.

Frontier agents aren’t your typical AI agent working away in the background, automating tasks and dealing with customer service queries. As journalists were told at a pre-briefing ahead of the annual re:Invent conference, they’re a “new class” of agent capable of working fully autonomously for hours or days without intervention.

These agents are highly scalable, self-learning, and represent the next iteration of the technology, according to the hyperscaler.

To mark its first foray on this front, AWS has launched three new frontier agents, which it said are primed to fundamentally transform software development. The company’s Kiro coding service, for example, is getting a big update with an agentic twist, dubbed Kiro Autonomous Agent.

Speaking to ITPro ahead of the event, David Yanacek, senior principal engineer for agentic AI at AWS, said these new capabilities will prove vital in helping developer teams speed up production in a safe and secure manner.

“These act as an extension to your team, more so than a tool for developers,” he said. “So we've started this category of what we call frontier agents. We've started by releasing three software development lifecycle related agents.”

According to AWS, the Kiro Autonomous Agent “maintains persistent context across a range of sessions,” meaning it’s lingering in the background learning from human processes.

While this appears similar to what one would consider a ‘traditional’ AI agent, this new class tracks human activity to improve continually, learning pull requests and providing users with feedback.

The agent comes with a range of capabilities, such as triaging bugs and improving code coverage, the company told assembled media.

“You can ask it questions, describe a task, and assign tasks in your backlog directly from GitHub,” AWS explained in a statement. Thereafter, the agent will “independently figure out” how to complete the task and share recommendations for changes, potential edits or pull requests.“

Security agents target safer software

Elsewhere, Yanacek told ITPro the new AWS Security Agent aims to drive the development of safer, more secure software.

According to AWS, the agent “embeds deep security expertise throughout the development lifecycle” by proactively reviewing design documents and scanning pull requests, comparing them to common vulnerabilities and in-house security requirements.

The launch of this frontier agent represents a step change in software development, according to Yanecek, addressing long-standing security-related issues and alignment between developer and security teams. The agent can perform penetration testing to probe for security vulnerabilities, for example, turning what was previously a laborious manual process into an “on-demand capability”.

“If you're a security team, you want to make sure that all of the teams in your organization are doing things in a secure way, ultimately, and so you want them to be penetration testing code, the changes that they make, the systems that they're building, that's an expensive thing to do,” he explained.

“It takes a lot of time and a lot of setup and execution,” Yanacek added. “Sometimes teams only get to practice only their most critical systems, because it just takes so much time.”

One AWS customer that’s already used the agent, photo-sharing firm SmugMug, was able to conduct penetration testing on multiple applications within the space of hours, rather than days, Yanecek told ITPro.

In simplifying and streamlining this aspect of the development lifecycle, agents are reducing manual toil and freeing up developers to focus on more critical tasks, he added.

“Now we've taken pen test time from weeks to hours, we can just cover more ground, so we can test more changes as they're going through than you could in practice before.”

DevOps gets the agentic treatment

The third and final frontier agent unveiled by AWS today, the AWS DevOps Agent, completes the agentic treatment for the SDLC. This tool aims to streamline DevOps practices, again with a focus on reducing toil for developers.

Similar to the security agent, this has a deep knowledge of user IT estates and applications, identifying relationships between areas such as observability tools, code repositories, and CI/CD pipelines.

It achieves this through mapping application resources, according to AWS, which enables the agent to rapidly respond to failures or bugs that often cause developers headaches.

“The DevOps agent works autonomously when there are alerts or things that will engage a human either in real time or later,” he explained. “It will do root cause incident management, come up with a safe mitigation plan, and shows all of its work along the way.”

Yanacek added that the agent will be proactive and continuously improve, studying previous incidents and identifying potential future issues.

“So it will find things around, maybe cost optimization of infrastructure, saying ‘hey, these are running underutilized’, or, ‘hey, your time to detect has been poor over time’,” he explained.

AWS has tracked an estimated root cause identification rate of around 86% using the agent to date, Yanacek told ITPro. Customers such as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia found that the agent was able to identify the root cause of software failure in just 15 minutes.

“It takes hours for this type of incident [to be identified] that they threw at it to try it out,” he noted. “So we’re seeing success with that.”

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