Code Assist - Agent SOP

Unless you’ve been in a coma, Agentic AI has completely revolutionized software development. Earlier in 2025, a mechanism to run determin-ish-tic agent procedures started gaining traction internally at Amazon, Agent SOPs. This was a powerful technique that completely changed how I produce code today.

When Agent SOPs were introduced, one of the most popular Agent SOPs being circulated, prompt-driven-development, one could go from a rough idea into a comprehensive design and implementation plan. The SOP would walk you through a series of requirement clarifications steps, structured research, and design phases. Great for larger-scope, ambiguous tasks, but complete overkill for small, straightforward implementation tasks. Recognizing how powerful the SOP format was at directing an agent to stick to a given workflow (a complete PITA in the early days), we needed something that could get as close as possible to one-shotting those small, straightforward tasks. Enter code-assist, an SOP I put together inspired by the Explore, Plan, Code, Commit worklow introduced by Anthropic, using this SOP mechanism resulted in significant productivity improvements across Amazon used by hundreds of teams across thousands of CRs. I’ve been thrilled it’s been open-sourced and can share this technique more widely.

• See the RE:Invent demo of it in action.
• Shout out to James Hood, the creator of the Agent SOP format, for making this all possible.