How Amazon’s Nova Act Extension Brings AI Agent Development Directly Into Your IDE

Amazon has just introduced the Nova Act extension, allowing developers to build and test AI agents directly inside integrated development environments such as Visual Studio Code, Amazon’s Kiro, and Cursor.

The company says the new extension addresses a common annoyance for developers: having to toggle between the IDE and a browser when testing agents.

Earlier this year, Amazon released Nova Act as an AI model and toolkit for creating autonomous agents in web browsers, the first product from its San Francisco AGI lab.

The extension adds features like natural‑language script generation, a notebook‑style builder for step‑by‑step execution, a real‑time debugger that unifies code and browser views, and an “operation viewer” for side‑by‑side workflow version comparison.

Nova Act is part of Amazon’s broader push to compete with OpenAI, Salesforce, Microsoft and Google by offering developer‑focused agent AI tools that go beyond generative AI requiring active user input.

Visual Studio Code dominates the code‑editor market with a massive extension ecosystem and cross‑platform support; Cursor is a popular AI‑enhanced fork of VS Code with natural‑language coding and smart search; and Amazon’s Kiro is an AI coding assistant that automatically creates and updates project plans and technical blueprints using agents.