Exploring AWS App Studio

Had a quick look at the newly released AWS App Studio to get a sense of what the fuss is about. Some quick initial notes:

• Currently only available in us-west-2

• Seems to rely on AWS SSO for authentication

• It's billed by user hour at $0.25 for deployed apps

But let's dive in: There are plenty of example prompts, so it's easy to get started. It'll generate detailed specs based on the prompt as well as a general app description. Surprisingly, the actual app generation part was super quick—so fast, that I'm assuming it was cached since I was using an unchanged example prompt. In contrast, the initial App Studio activation might take up to 30 minutes.

My initial reaction to the generated app was underwhelmed. Mostly tables over data, with a visual editor. Besides the App UI, a potentially interesting component could be the Automations part, where workflows can be visually modeled.

The most surprising part though: Besides the initial generation, you're on your own for ongoing changes—through the editor. The chat interface is simply a doc chatbot. One can really hope that's a preview/beta limitation only, since that's where it would actually become interesting.

In fact: If I was building this, I'd drop the entire visual editor in favor of a fully chat-driven approach. Like, "let's add a delete button to the maintenance requests lists".

Anyway, personally, I'll stick with other methods of code generation. Having said that, I'm certain there are use cases where this is pretty close to what enterprise customers would consider for some internal scenarios. However, when looking at competitors in this space, it's clear there's a long way to go.

I'll be following how the App Studio journey continues and will check again further down the road.