Move to Anthropic SDK for AWS Bedrock and Vertex

[chezsmithy]

Validations

• I believe this is a way to improve. I'll try to join the Continue Discord for questions
• I'm not able to find an open issue that requests the same enhancement

Problem

I've been looking at how other AI code assistant tools seem to very quickly add support for the latest anthropic features on AWS Bedrock and have noted they are using a library provided by anthropic to accelerate their feature support. Continue is using the converse API from AWS which regularily seems to lag behind what Anthropic is offering, and it is difficult to translate the features from anthropic documentation to make it work reliably. For example, Prompt caching for AWS bedrock is in preview but we are still waiting for AWS to update the Javascript SDK to even support the features. Similar issue for thinking tags support. Finally, the tag names and use of tools as a message type are also not supported, and require extensive translation debugging etc.

Solution

I'd like to recommend we build a new provider called bedrock-anthropic that uses this SDK as the base of it's support: @anthropic-ai/bedrock-sdk.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anthropic-ai/bedrock-sdk
https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-typescript/tree/main/packages/bedrock-sdk

Note, we may also want to consider using the anthropic ADK for vertex as well:

https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-typescript/tree/main/packages/vertex-sdk