Amazon introduced a Nova Act extension to build and test AI agents directly inside integrated development environments including Visual Studio Code, Amazon’s Kiro, and Cursor.
The company says the new extension, unveiled Tuesday, addresses a common frustration for developers: the constant back-and-forth between an IDE and a browser when testing agents.
It follows the March launch of Nova Act, Amazon’s AI model and toolkit for creating autonomous agents in web browsers. Nova Act was the first release from Amazon’s AGI Lab in San Francisco.
Amazon says features of the new extension include natural-language script generation, a notebook-style builder for cell-by-cell execution, live debugging with a unified view of code and browser actions, and an ‘Action Viewer’ to compare workflow versions side-by-side.
Nova Act is part of a broader effort by Amazon to compete with rivals including OpenAI, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google in offering agentic AI tools to developers and businesses, attempting to expand beyond generative AI tools that require active user involvement.
Visual Studio Code dominates the market for code editors, with a large ecosystem of extensions and cross-platform support. Cursor is a popular AI-powered fork of VS Code with natural-language coding and smart search. Amazon’s Kiro is an AI coding tool that uses agents to automatically create and update project plans and technical blueprints.
