[achempion]

Sounds like a giant misunderstanding. Not all projects use git, like in the old days someone could just develop with FTP connection.

If the code is on AWS, what prevents you from logging into the instance and grabbing a codebase from here?

[foobarbaz33]

Not OP, but it sounds like "AWS" was a hand-wavy misdirection the employee used to delay action from the owner who didn't even know what AWS was.