Comment by Max-Ganz-II | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Max-Ganz-II | Hacker News Reader

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Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years.

This was for a question about how billing works.

It went like this;

1. Case created.

2. Unassigned for seven days.

3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn't find an answer, he couldn't - which is good, he didn't try to give me the wrong answer - he escalates. That's fine - a lot of questions are simple and even silly, and first line support is there to handle them - but they could have done all this without me, if they'd opened the ticket themselves rather than me having to chase.

4. Eleven days later, comes back with exactly the wrong answer. In the meantime, I had figured out the correct answer, and reply, explaining it to him.

5. Next day, I get a wall of plainly AI generated text telling me my answer is correct.

It seems to me a key issue here relating to AI generated text, is a misunderstanding on the part of AWS that I as a consumer will value that answer exactly (or indeed, even remotely) as I would value the answer from a human.

I do not. I almost ignore AI generated text, as I think it as unvalidated response.

AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.

Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted.

For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.

The problem is using AI to “push” the answer to an asker. Unless the company has hidden docs they use for support (which why would that ever benefit them), I could get just as good of an answer if I point my LLM at your docs (“pull” an answer). In fact, the response might be better because I have context set up to tune it to my understanding.

Instead, you (company / support agent) have decided that I should instead have a conversation with an LLM through a worse, more opaque harness to the detriment of all of us.

It would be interesting to hear the other side, the people running support. I wonder what fraction of requests are answered by basic knowledge and stuff clearly in the docs. At some very high fraction I could see a lot of pressure/incentive to optimize for these cases.

From talking to people I know on support teams at hyperscalers and other tech companies: A mind-boggling huge portion.

But even as an AI believer and thinking it's great for this sort of thing, I also think if it's good enough for this sort of work, it should be good enough to identify when it's not capable of providing value, too.

Gosh, that's kind of sad. I hate having to wait 12 to 24 hours for an answer from AWS support - there's no way I'm raising the ticket without exhausting all avenues from my end.

> AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.

I disagree, personally. The way they were employed in GP's example, yeah, that's annoying and hostile.

But almost every time I go to some documentation page for a commercial product now and it doesn't have that, I find it pretty annoying (I don't expect an open source library to wire this up and pay for it, ofc).

It means I have to convey these docs to my own LLM, I will waste cycles and tokens fetching them, etc.

Your version sounds like it's potentially useful. The thing that winds me up is when the online chat that used to be talking with real support people gets quietly replaced with some LLM-backed noise generator and there's no way to contact real support people any more (possibly because 95% of them were laid off).

Yeah that's a totally different thing, agreed that's really hostile and companies over a certain amount of revenue should be forced to have human support agents.

> AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.

Meh. It's no big change to before, where you had first-level support search for something vaguely related and just dumping a template to the user.

The thing is... it actually works better than I'd like, because in a lot of cases it turns out that you (as the user) forgot to follow one tiny step in the documentation.

What I'd actually like to see as the user is the AI actually going over my AWS account, looking up the resources and their state on its own, and figuring out what exactly I missed, but (un?)fortunately that cannot be easily done for IAM permission reasons...

The big difference IME is that first-tier support at decent companies at least had the grace to recognise when they couldn't help and needed to escalate. I can count the number of times I've seen an AI bot automatically escalate when it was unable to find the solution on zero hands.

Agreed. I remember a couple of years ago raising an AWS support ticket and eventually got an answer about it being some undocumented limitation in Aurora Serverless v1. Now I get equivalent of googling my question before I can even raise a ticket.

Even more annoying, is when the integrated "chat with AI" boxes don't actually have full knowledge about the website. Tried a couple of different such boxes, and in the end I still had to crawl the website on my own to find the information.

Don't feel too bad.

I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD.

Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccurate the response was based on the questions asked.

This where I don’t get the HN flame at Google.

I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me through.

It can be two things. People’s main complaint about Google’s cloud services is that you are forever at the risk of an automatic and unappealable ban of your whole account.

Two things can be true.

We recently had an issue with our production Oracle database. Our in-house DBAs spent hours trying to get the AI support bot to assign a real person to join the incident call. It took more than 2 hours to get an actual person on the call.

We literally pay hundreds of thousands a year in Oracle support contracts, and this is what we get? AI bots? Nope. Migrating to Postgres is now a top priority.

This "replace people with AI" nonsense has to stop. [0]

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-m...

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