Amazon Q Developer CLI: an agentic terminal assistant that AWS has stopped developing

What the q CLI does, and who it was built for

Amazon Q Developer CLI is an agentic chat experience that runs in your terminal, and the repository describes it as a way to build applications using natural language. The binary is named q, and the workspace member that produces it is crates/chat-cli, described in the README as the crate that "allows users to interface with Amazon Q Developer from the command line". The audience is developers who already live in a shell: people who would rather ask for a code change, a command, or an explanation from the same window where they run git and cargo than switch to an editor plugin.

The repository is written in Rust and dual licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0, with the two licence files sitting at LICENSE.MIT and LICENSE.APACHE. It is an AWS project, so the client crates in the workspace carry AWS names: amzn-codewhisperer-client, amzn-qdeveloper-streaming-client, amzn-consolas-client, and amzn-toolkit-telemetry-client. That naming is the clearest signal of what the tool actually is. The chat surface is open source, but the model behind it is a hosted AWS service, and the CLI is the client.

How the agent loop is wired: chat-cli, the agent crate, and streaming clients

The Cargo.toml workspace lists ten members, and the arrangement is worth reading before you decide how much of this you can reuse. crates/chat-cli is the default member and the entry point. crates/agent holds the agent logic as its own crate, and crates/chat-cli-ui is split out for the terminal interface. On the network side there are several generated clients, including amzn-qdeveloper-streaming-client and amzn-codewhisperer-streaming-client, which is what the streaming in the name refers to: responses arrive incrementally rather than as one payload.

Authentication is handled through AWS SDK crates rather than a bespoke token store. The workspace depends on aws-sdk-cognitoidentity and aws-sdk-ssooidc, which is consistent with the login subcommand shown in the README. There is also a semantic-search-client crate and a schemas/ directory at the top level, plus a docs/ directory and a book.toml, so part of the documentation is built as a book rather than as plain markdown.

The practical consequence of this layout is that the interesting logic is not a single file you can read in an afternoon. If you want to understand how a prompt becomes a tool call, you are reading the agent crate and then following the streaming client. If you only want to use q, none of this matters, but it does explain why the project was never going to be a thin wrapper.

Installing Amazon Q Developer CLI on macOS and Linux

The README gives two macOS paths and points Linux users at the AWS documentation. On macOS you can install through Homebrew with the cask named amazon-q, or download the DMG from the desktop release URL. The Homebrew command is the shortest route.

brew install --cask amazon-q

After that, the q binary is on your PATH. The README does not show a first-run command beyond the login flow used in the contributing section, so the honest statement is that the README documents installation and login but not a full first-session walkthrough. Linux users are sent to the AWS user guide for Ubuntu/Debian, AppImage, and alternative Linux builds; the repository does not inline those steps.

If you want to build from source instead, the README's prerequisites are macOS with Xcode 13 or later and Brew. The Rust toolchain comes from Rustup, and the project needs both stable and nightly because formatting runs on nightly.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
rustup default stable
rustup toolchain install nightly
cargo install typos-cli

Then clone and run the chat binary. The README shows the login subcommand through cargo, which is the pattern for any subcommand.

git clone https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli.git
cargo run --bin chat_cli -- login

The other documented commands are cargo test, cargo clippy, cargo +nightly fmt, and cargo run --bin chat_cli -- {subcommand}. Note that the README's build instructions are macOS-specific even though the product ships for Linux; contributors on Linux are told nothing about prerequisites here.

The maintenance notice is the first thing to read

The top of the README carries an important note, and it is not buried. It states that this open source project is no longer being actively maintained and will only receive critical security fixes. It then says Amazon Q Developer CLI is available as Kiro CLI, described as a closed-source product, and directs users to Kiro CLI for the latest features and updates, with Kiro CLI issues to be filed in the kirodotdev/Kiro repository instead.

That changes the adoption question. The last push to the default branch was on 2026-08-24, and the most recent tagged releases in the listing are v1.19.7, v1.19.6, and v1.19.5 from November 2025. The workspace version in Cargo.toml is 1.19.7, matching the newest tag. So the code is not abandoned in the sense of a dead repository, but the stated policy is security fixes only, and the successor is closed source. If your reason for choosing this tool was that it is open source, the successor does not preserve that property.

There is a second constraint that follows from the same notice: feature requests and non-security bugs have no stated path. The README points Kiro CLI users at a different tracker, which implies the Amazon Q tracker is not where new work lands.

Where the q CLI is the wrong tool

Windows is the clearest gap. The README lists macOS DMG and Homebrew, then Ubuntu/Debian, AppImage, and alternative Linux builds. No Windows installer appears, and the contributing prerequisites mention macOS only. If your team is on Windows, this is not a tool you can roll out from the documentation in the repository.

The second case is anything that needs a supported dependency. The README says the project receives critical security fixes only, so a bug that is not a security issue has no promised fix. That is a real risk if you are building automation on top of q, or if you are vendoring the agent crate into your own product. It matters less if you use q interactively and can switch tools when something breaks.

The third case is reproducibility. Because the model runs behind AWS streaming clients and login goes through SSO and Cognito, you cannot run this fully offline against a local model. If your requirement is that no prompt leaves your machine, the architecture in Cargo.toml rules it out.

Finally, the build instructions themselves are a friction point for contributors. Requiring both stable and nightly toolchains plus typos-cli before you can run cargo test is a higher bar than a single cargo build, and the README does not explain why nightly is needed beyond formatting.

Alternatives and the difference in approach

The successor named in the README is Kiro CLI, and the difference is not cosmetic: Kiro CLI is described as a closed-source product, so you trade the MIT and Apache 2.0 licensing of this repository for a vendor-controlled binary. If you were relying on the ability to read, patch, or fork the client, that ability does not carry over. If you only want the newest features and are comfortable with a closed product, the README's own recommendation is to move.

A different kind of alternative is to skip the chat client entirely and call the AWS APIs yourself. The workspace already contains the generated clients, including amzn-qdeveloper-streaming-client and amzn-codewhisperer-streaming-client, which means the streaming protocol is expressed as Rust code in this repository rather than hidden. Building on those crates gives you control over the agent loop at the cost of writing it. The catch is that the workspace sets publish = false, so these crates are not published to crates.io as part of this project; you would be depending on the repository rather than a versioned package.

For teams whose real requirement is an open source terminal agent with an active maintainer, the honest answer is that this repository is not that anymore, and the README does not name an open source replacement. Choosing between q and Kiro CLI is choosing between a frozen open codebase and a maintained closed one.

Licence, upgrade cost, and what to verify before adopting

The repository is dual licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0, with both texts present as LICENSE.MIT and LICENSE.APACHE, and the workspace package metadata declares license = "MIT OR Apache-2.0". That is a permissive pair, which is the usual reason a project picks it: you can use the code in proprietary products. This is a description of what the files say, not legal advice, and the trademark section in the README is separate from the code licence. It states that Amazon Web Services and related marks are AWS trademarks and may not be used in a way that suggests endorsement or causes confusion. If you fork and redistribute, the code licence and the trademark policy are two different questions.

Upgrade cost is unusual here because there is not much of an upgrade path inside the project. The README says critical security fixes only, and the newest release listed is v1.19.7 from 2025-11-17. If a fix ships, you take it; if a feature ships, it ships in Kiro CLI instead. Pinning to a specific version is therefore more about stability than about chasing features.

Before adopting, verify three things. Check that your platform is covered, since the README documents macOS and Linux only. Check whether you can accept a client whose backend is a hosted AWS service with SSO and Cognito login. And read the notice at the top of the README yourself, because it is the single fact that determines whether this project fits your situation.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt it only if you want a terminal chat agent on macOS or Linux and you accept that the README says the open source project receives critical security fixes only, with Kiro CLI as the successor. Skip it if you need a maintained dependency or Windows support, since the README lists macOS and Linux installation paths and nothing for Windows. Before you build anything on it, read the notice at the top of the README, confirm the licence files LICENSE.MIT and LICENSE.APACHE in the repository root, and check whether the crates you depend on are published, because Cargo.toml sets publish = false for the workspace.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. aws/amazon-q-developer-cli on GitHub
2. License: Apache-2.0
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases