Intro
I've been running Amplify Gen2 in production for a while now, and the single most annoying part is this: every time I want to check something, I have to deploy. Tweak the backend, push it up with ampx sandbox, wait for it to apply, check, tweak again. Do that a dozen times a day and it quietly grinds you down.
Then on 2026-06-16, AWS Blocks showed up in public preview. It's a set of backend "Building Blocks" — auth, database, file storage, real-time, async jobs, AI agents — that you compose together, and the headline pitch is that you can develop entirely locally, with no AWS account.
The thing is, I read the preview announcement and it didn't actually answer the questions I cared about. Three of them, specifically:
Is this something I migrate to from Amplify? Or something I add to my existing Amplify Gen2 app?
