I've been using jq quite a bit with AWS CLI inside various bash scripts. It allows manipulation and filtering the native api doesn't, which makes it pretty straight forward to get certain values - such as specific tags on the current instance (converted to key-value form, or to turn into bash variables), a list of other systems in the current auto scaling group, etc.

I've also started using it just to get colorized/formatted output from curl or a local json file.

    cat file.json | jq