--- title: "AWS Chatbot’s Rename to Amazon Q Developer is a Step Backward" id: "14929" type: "post" slug: "aws-chatbots-rename-to-amazon-q-developer-is-a-step-backward" published_at: "2025-02-27T17:31:53+00:00" modified_at: "2025-03-17T22:02:54+00:00" url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-chatbots-rename-to-amazon-q-developer-is-a-step-backward/" markdown_url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-chatbots-rename-to-amazon-q-developer-is-a-step-backward.md" excerpt: "Changing AWS Chatbot to Amazon Q Developer presumably serves internal AWS purposes that may or may not resemble empire-building, but it serves no customers." taxonomy_category: - "Uncategorized" --- AWS recently put out a blog post, innocently titled [AWS Chatbot is now named Amazon Q Developer](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/aws-chatbot-is-now-named-amazon-q-developer/) . This presumably serves internal AWS purposes that may or may not resemble empire-building, but I posit that it serves no customers. The article begins by telling us that “This update represents more than a name change—it’s an enhancement of our chat-based DevOps capabilities.” Here’s where that idea falls flat. First, AWS Chatbot has historically been an explicit integration worked into Slack and (presumably) MS Teams environments that reports on specific, explicit things. I’ve made use of it for years, both with a [ClickOps](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/clickops/) detector that reports when people make changes via the console in my environment, as well as reporting findings from the (excellent) [AWS Cost Anomaly Detection](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-anomaly-detection/) service. This has been positioned to me, and I have used it, as very much a “just the facts, ma’am” reporting of explicit events happening within my AWS account. It further alerts me when custom CloudWatch alarms trigger, and reports AWS Health Events (such as when the cloud decides to no longer cloud for a time). The uniting thread across these diverse use cases is simple: in no way, shape, or form do I want any of these things to be editorialized. Second, precision matters here and details matter. Amazon Q has improved significantly since its [disastrous launch](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-degenerative-ai-blunder/) , to the point where it usually doesn’t lie to my face anymore—but when it comes to outages, security reports, alarm thresholds, and cost overruns, “usually” doesn’t cut it. Furthermore, the change sacrifices communication clarity. When I talked about AWS Chatbot, it was explicitly clear what I was referring to. When I talk about Amazon Q Developer (I’m not even going to touch the completely different [Amazon Q Business](https://aws.amazon.com/q/business/) offering), it’s now unclear whether I mean: - A chatbot in Slack - The popup that shows up when you visit AWS’s homepage - The more fully featured popup inside the authenticated AWS console - The integration into IDE and other development environments - The paid-for per-seat offering - The macOS installable application - The command-line completions that installable grants me - The .NET application port from Windows to Linux - The mainframe migration offering - The VMware migration offering - The Java version upgrade offering - The no-code data assistant hiding somewhere in the console AI systems are inherently fallible. AWS’s own [responsible AI policy](https://aws.amazon.com/ai/responsible-ai/policy/) states: “If you use the AI/ML Services to make consequential decisions, you must evaluate the potential risks of your use case and implement appropriate human oversight, testing, and other use case-specific safeguards to mitigate such risks.” The trouble is that until now, I didn’t have to *do that* for alerts showing up in Slack. But now we’ve piled abstraction atop abstraction to the point where it’s no longer reasonably possible to understand what the computer is doing. I’m not a Luddite, and I don’t hate AI—but I am asking just *what all this is for*. What previously unaddressed customer need is now being met in exchange for the cost of reasonable certainty? An example given in the blog post is “What EC2 instances are in us-east-1?” It’ll presumably reply with something kinda accurate, but it won’t point out critical outliers. - “None in us-east-1, but a bunch in us-east-2” - “Also, you have a massive number of Fargate containers running” - “Did you mean in the account that’s hooked up to Slack, or within your entire AWS organization?” No customers that I can identify are being served by this. It’s a shame that AWS is increasingly putting its own product roadmap needs ahead of customer obsession. If you need me, I suppose I’ll be turning back the clock six years and [integrating SNS into Slack webhooks](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49341187/confirming-aws-sns-topic-subscription-for-slack-webhook) for the certainty factor. by Corey Quinn Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. ## More Posts from Corey [Back to the Blog](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/) [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/) ### [Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/) [By Corey Quinn](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/author/cquinn/) Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner AWS has just released something fascinating in the form of CloudWatch Omni. 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I used that slot to argue that the primary reader of your telemetry is no longer a human, and […] [Read More about Reading Observability Tools? That’s a Robot’s Job](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/reading-observability-tools-thats-a-robots-job/) [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) ### [S3 Is Not a Filesystem (But Now There’s One In Front of It)](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) [By Corey Quinn](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/author/cquinn/) I’ve been saying “S3 is not a filesystem” for over a decade. I’ve said it on stages, in newsletters, on podcasts, and directly to the faces of large company employees who were too polite to tell me to shut up before they went back to their FUSE monstrosities. It was one of those reliable truths […] [Read More about S3 Is Not a Filesystem (But Now There’s One In Front of It)](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) ## Get the newsletter! Stay up to date on the latest AWS news, opinions, and tools, all lovingly sprinkled with a bit of snark. "*" indicates required fields