Key findings
- Agentic coding draws the most praise. 20 of 21 accounts that discuss it are positive, and 12 describe Q as an agent that carries tasks through.
- The Q CLI is the best-liked part of the product. 13 of 14 accounts that discuss terminal work praise it, and that CLI became Kiro CLI on November 17, 2025.
- Answer quality is raised by all 11 accounts that discuss it, bugs by all 10, and product direction by all 8, from the AWS Chatbot rename to Kiro CLI's closed source.
- Six of the 14 team and company accounts are negative. Nine accounts date from after the April 30, 2026 end-of-support announcement.
Engineers liked Amazon Q Developer as an agent on the command line and for AWS work, and uneven answers and bugs held it back. AWS has since moved that command-line agent to Kiro, so read this record as the history of the tool your team is leaving. GILD reviewed 70 public accounts published from January 14, 2025 to September 28, 2026.
Who wrote the record
Overall, 30 accounts are positive, 22 mixed, and 18 negative, with GitHub bug reports counted as mixed unless the author dropped Q. They include 39 Hacker News comments, 11 r/aws posts, 7 GitHub issues on AWS Q repositories, 3 DEV posts, a newsletter, 7 blog posts and reviews, a conference talk, and an X post. Issue trackers favor problem reports. Fifty-six come from individual engineers and 14 from teams or companies. Twenty-six concern the CLI or terminal work, so they describe the tool that is now Kiro CLI.
Twelve accounts date from 2026, with 9 after the April 30, 2026 announcement. An Amazon engineer still preferred Q in IntelliJ and used Free at home. Seven GitHub issues describe permission prompts, sign-outs, ignored rules, and installation failure in Visual Studio 2026.
| Finding | Accounts |
|---|---|
| Praise agentic coding | |
| Praise the Q CLI and terminal work | |
| Raise answer quality | |
| Raise bugs and stability | |
| Raise product direction | |
| Praise AWS knowledge |
GILD analysis of 70 public accounts, January 14, 2025 to September 28, 2026, reviewed October 12 to 27, 2026
What engineers valued
Engineers compared Q CLI with Claude Code in 2025 and valued its flat seat price. One switched because Claude Code cost too much while Q Pro stayed near US$20 a month. Another reports hours saved on IAM, S3, and ECS debugging, but had to fix generated CloudFormation before deployment.
All 9 accounts discussing cost treat it as an advantage or a fact. They cite Free access and the US$19 Pro seat, with Claude models at no extra charge.
What held it back
Engineers report rejected IAM questions and console answers worse than web search. They also describe days of high-load errors and, in 2026, Visual Studio permission prompts for every file read. A team evaluation found inline suggestions slower than GitHub Copilot.
Accounts that compare Q with other assistants split 8 to 7. Eight preferred Q for price, Visual Studio support, or task results, and seven moved to Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code.
What the move to Kiro looks like
Engineers saw AWS's direction before the end-of-support notice. In November 2025 one Q CLI user asked why they should move to Kiro CLI, and another noted that the open-source Q CLI had become a closed Kiro CLI installed through curl. An organization running its base infrastructure on AWS said Q Developer declined once agentic features arrived.
Two 2026 accounts show the move inside organizations. A global enterprise software company with about 1,300 engineers ran Kiro, Q Developer, and Cursor side by side, according to a case study by its analytics vendor, Jellyfish. It bought all three through AWS Marketplace under a multi-year AWS commitment. Its usage measurement stayed unbroken across the Q Developer to Kiro transition. In August 2026 Robert J. Berger, a chief architect and head of platform engineering, found that the console's Upgrade to Kiro button moves a whole IAM Identity Center group from Q Developer to Kiro at once. He also found that subscribing from a member account fails with AccessDeniedException, and that a tier change took effect only after he logged in again. Check each group's members before an administrator clicks Upgrade to Kiro, and pilot Kiro on your own repositories first.
Methodology
Every account is a public English-language page GILD opened between October 12 and October 27, 2026. GILD recorded its author, date, group, sentiment, and positions, using the method in GILD's Signals specification. Hacker News comments came through the Hacker News API, r/aws posts through the Arctic Shift Reddit archive, GitHub issues through the GitHub API, and the X post through FxTwitter. AWS employees' posts, posts written for AWS's 2025 game-building T-shirt campaign, and customer stories AWS published on its own blog are excluded. Comments by Amazon engineers about their own use are kept and marked. One author can write more than one account. A finding shows in a Signals view only with at least 5 accounts from 3 different authors.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 4
- Public source
- 12
- AWS DevOps Blog: Amazon Q Developer end-of-support announcement (Apr 30, 2026)
- Amazon Q Developer docs: Using Amazon Q Developer on the command line
- Amazon Q Developer pricing
- Amazon Q Developer docs: Tiers of service, Free and Pro
- Hacker News: nullandvoid on moving from Amazon Q back to Copilot (Jul 14, 2025)
- Hacker News: artdigital on Amazon Q Pro on the CLI (Apr 17, 2025)
- Hacker News: quintes on Amazon Q refusing an IAM policy question (May 12, 2025)
- r/aws: aviboy2006 on Amazon Q Developer for AWS infrastructure and debugging (Aug 11, 2025)
- r/aws: strangerofnowhere on slow inline suggestions during a team evaluation (Sep 14, 2025)
- r/aws: Cultural_Village7083, Is there an AI strategy for AWS? (Oct 11, 2025)
- r/aws: aviboy2006, What's difference between Amazon Q developer CLI and Kiro CLI (Nov 19, 2025)
- r/aws: kesor, Kiro CLI - is it OSS? (Nov 19, 2025)
- Hacker News: iLoveOncall, an Amazon engineer, on Q Developer in IntelliJ (Jun 22, 2026)
- GitHub issue: Amazon Q in Visual Studio asks permission for every file (Jul 17, 2026)
- Jellyfish: Inside a 1,300-Engineer Kiro, Amazon Q Developer, and Cursor Organization (customer case study, undated, opened Oct 25, 2026)
- DEV Community, AWS Community Builders: Billing Kiro CLI (and my KiroCrew agent) to the Company AWS Account via IAM Identity Center (Robert J. Berger, Aug 14, 2026)