Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced a new class of artificial intelligence systems called “frontier agents” that can work autonomously for hours or even days without human intervention, representing one of the most ambitious attempts yet to automate the full software development lifecycle.The announcement, made during AWS CEO Matt Garman’s keynote address at the company’s annual re:Invent conference, introduces three specialized AI agents designed to act as virtual team members: Kiro autonomous agent for software development, AWS Security Agent for application security, and AWS DevOps Agent for IT operations.The move signals Amazon’s intent to leap ahead in the intensifying competition to build AI systems capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks that currently require teams of skilled engineers.”We see frontier agents as a completely new class of agents,” said Deepak Singh, vice president of developer agents and experiences at Amazon, in an interview ahead of the announcement. “They’re fundamentally designed to work for hours and days. You’re not giving them a problem that you want finished in the next five minutes. You’re giving them complex challenges that they may have to think about, try different solutions, and get to the right conclusion — and they should do that without intervention.”Why Amazon believes its new agents leave existing AI coding tools behindThe frontier agents differ from existing AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot or Amazon’s own CodeWhisperer in several fundamental ways.Current AI coding tools, while powerful, require engineers to drive every interaction. Developers must write prompts, provide context, and manually coordinate work across different code repositories. When switching between tasks, the AI loses context and must start fresh.The new frontier agents, by contrast, maintain persistent memory across sessions and continuously learn from an organization’s codebase, documentation, and team communications. They can independently determine which code repositories require changes, work on multiple files simultaneously, and coordinate complex transformations spanning dozens of microse …
