Why Amazon Q Sucks: A Frustrated Look at AWS’s AI Assistant
The Promise vs. The Reality
AWS marketed Amazon Q as an intelligent AI assistant designed to help users navigate AWS services, diagnose issues, and streamline cloud management. In theory, it should be a game-changer for DevOps teams, reducing time spent on troubleshooting and documentation searches.
However, in practice, Amazon Q is more of a liability than a solution. Users across Reddit, forums, and AWS communities have been voicing their frustration with Q’s inability to handle real-world AWS problems. Instead of offering useful guidance, it often provides hallucinated answers, vague responses, or outright incorrect information.
Amazon Q's Biggest Failures
1. It Struggles With Basic AWS Troubleshooting
One of Amazon Q’s primary selling points was its ability to help diagnose AWS service issues. But when users ask it simple questions like, “Why is my CloudFront distribution not working?”, Q either provides generic documentation links or worse, completely incorrect configurations. This isn’t just unhelpful—it’s dangerous in a production environment.
A user on Reddit shared their experience of asking Amazon Q to help with S3 bucket permissions. Instead of identifying the issue correctly, it gave them misleading advice that could have compromised their security settings. Imagine following an AI assistant’s advice only to open up your infrastructure to unauthorized access—not exactly the reliability AWS is known for.
2. AI Hallucinations Make It Unusable
One of the worst aspects of Amazon Q is its tendency to hallucinate answers—meaning it makes up responses that sound convincing but are completely wrong.
A developer reported asking Q how many S3 buckets were in their account. Q confidently replied, “At least six.” The actual number? 47.
Another case involved trying to generate AWS CLI commands. Instead of giving a functional command, Q completely fabricated syntax that didn’t exist in the official AWS CLI. AWS documentation may be complex, but at least it doesn’t lie to your face like Q does.
3. It's a Product of AWS FOMO
AWS has built its reputation on strong cloud infrastructure, not AI innovation. But with Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI pushing AI copilots, AWS felt the need to jump on the bandwagon. The result? An AI assistant that nobody asked for and few find useful.
AWS leadership seems to have rushed Amazon Q to market, prioritizing hype over functionality. Unlike ChatGPT, which can provide detailed explanations and working solutions for AWS-related queries, Q often feels like an internal experiment that never should have left beta.
4. AWS Support Is Still Better Than Q
Many AWS users would prefer old-school AWS support tickets over Amazon Q. Why? Because AWS support engineers at least understand nuance, context, and real-world AWS architectures.
Q, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have the ability to handle cross-service troubleshooting. If you ask it about an issue involving IAM permissions affecting an EC2 instance’s access to S3, it will likely fail to connect the dots between these services.
For an AI assistant built specifically for AWS, that’s unacceptable.
Should AWS Just Kill Amazon Q?
AWS has never been known for user-friendly interfaces. The AWS console itself is infamous for being complex and unintuitive, requiring deep knowledge to navigate efficiently. The introduction of Amazon Q was supposed to fix that, but instead, it’s become just another layer of frustration.
At this point, AWS has two choices:
- Invest heavily in making Q actually useful—improving its reasoning abilities, fixing its hallucinations, and giving it access to reliable internal AWS data.
- Admit defeat and pull the plug, letting third-party AI tools (like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude) do what they already do better.
Right now, Amazon Q is a waste of time for serious AWS users. Unless AWS makes drastic improvements, it’s likely that developers will continue ignoring Q in favor of more reliable, external AI assistants.
Until then, if you see the Amazon Q icon in your AWS console, do yourself a favor—just ignore it.
Amazon Q kind of sucks, best to put it aside for now
