Amazon Q Sucks

And even though I just said it was indescribable, I’m going to try anyway.

Last night, I was having a problem trying to set something up on CloudFront in my personal AWS account. I looked at the sidebar and thought, why not ask Amazon’s “built-in integrated AWS AI”?

Logically, you’d think it would know which services I had running, which services Amazon offers, what each of those services actually is, how they work, and how to do the things I was asking for.

I was wrong…

It knew some of the services Amazon offered. It knew none of the services I was using, and the instructions it gave me were several versions of the service out of date. It was literally telling me to click things that don’t exist anymore.

I muddled along anyway, sort-of-knowing what I was doing, trying to translate its useless instructions into reality. What happened? Whatever I was trying to do failed. Three times.

Guess what I did next? I asked ChatGPT.

Think about that. The AI that isn’t owned by Amazon. The AI that isn’t integrated into AWS and its services. The AI that technically has less direct knowledge about AWS…

And guess what it was able to do? It gave me exact and detailed instructions on how to solve the problem in AWS that AWS itself couldn’t solve. The instructions worked, first time, in minutes.

So I say again: Amazon Q is rubbish, and a massive waste of compute resource. If an AI living inside the actual console can’t even handle its own home turf, what is it even there for?