> For users who access Kiro with Pro or Pro+ tiers once they are available, your content is not used to train any underlying foundation models (FMs). AWS might collect and use client-side telemetry and usage metrics for service improvement purposes. You can opt out of this data collection by adjusting your settings in the IDE. For the Kiro Free tier and during preview, your content, including code snippets, conversations, and file contents open in the IDE, unless explicitly opted out, may be used to enhance and improve the quality of FMs. Your content will not be used if you use the opt-out mechanism described in the documentation. If you have an Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription and access Kiro through your AWS account with the Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription, then Kiro will not use your content for service improvement. For more information, see Service Improvement.
Hello folks! I've been working on Kiro for nearly a year now. Happy to chat about some of the things that make it unique in the IDE space. We've added a few powerful things that I think make it a bit different from other similar AI editors.
In specific, I'm really proud of "spec driven development", which is based on the internal processes that software development teams at Amazon use to build very large technical projects. Kiro can take your basic "vibe coding" prompt, and expand it into deep technical requirements, a design document (with diagrams), and a task list to break down large projects into smaller, more realistic chunks of work.
I've had a ton of fun not just working on Kiro, but also coding with Kiro. I've also published a sample project I built while working on Kiro. It's a fairly extensive codebase for an infinite crafting game, almost 95% AI coded, thanks to the power of Kiro: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro
This, along with the "CHALLENGE.md" and "ROADMAP.md" document, is an incredibly cool way to show off your project and to give people a playground to use to try it out. The game idea itself is pretty interesting too.
It would be awesome if I ... didn't have to deal with AWS to use it. I guess maybe that might be a good use case for agentic coding: "Hey, Kiro - can you make this thing just use a local database and my Anthropic API key?"
Complaining aside though, I think that's just such a cool framework for a demo. Nice idea.
Thanks a lot! I plan to fork the project and make a generic version that runs entirely locally using your GPU to do everything. My early tests ran pretty well on NVIDIA 5070. So that's next on my project list to open source in my free time. The only thing more fun that building an AI agent, is using it to build your own ideas!
I don't know if this is feedback for Kiro per se or more feedback for this category of applications as a whole, but I've personally noticed that the biggest barrier holding me back from giving an earnest look at new coding agents are the custom rules I've set up w/ my existing agents. I have extensively used Copilot, Continue, Cursor, Cline, Aider, Roo Code, and Claude Code. I've just finished porting my rules over to Claude Code and this is something I do not want to do again [even if it's as simple as dragging and dropping files].
Companies would benefit a lot by creating better onboarding flows that migrate users from other applications. It should either bring in the rules 1:1 or have an llm agent transform them into a format that works better for the agent.
You will be happy to find out that Kiro is quite good at this! One of my favorite features is "Steering Rules". Kiro can help you write steering rules for your projects, and the steering rules that it auto generates are actually super great for large projects. You can see some examples of auto generated steering files here in one of my open source projects: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro/tree/main/.kiro...
Also these steering rules are just markdown files, so you can just drop your other rules files from other tools into the `.kiro/steering` directory, and they work as is.
Problems w auth / security in MCP skeeve me out. For that reason, I really don't want to invest in workflows that depend on MCP and have steered clear. But I'd be grateful for well-informed comments / advice on that front.
As for a hypothetical new "context setup" protocol like you posit, I suspect it'd benefit from the "cognitive tools" ideas in this awesome paper / project: <https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering>
in the early days of building something like that, would love to talk for 10 minutes and get your advice if you have the time? I couldn't find your email but mine is in my profile.
Have you documented how you built this project using Kiro? Your learnings may help us get the best out of Kiro as we experiment with it for our medium+ size projects.
But in the meantime I'm also the author of the "Learn by Playing" guide in the Kiro docs. It goes step by step through using Kiro on this codebase, in the `challenge` branch. You can see how Kiro performs on a series of tasks starting with light things like basic vibe coding to update an HTML page, then slightly deeper things like fixing some bugs that I deliberately left in the code, then even deeper to a full fledged project to add email verification and password reset across client, server, and infrastructure as code. There is also an intro to using hooks, MCP, and steering files to completely customize the behavior of Kiro.
Actually yes! I saw this post some months ago, and thought to myself: "Wow this is really close to what we've been building". Kiro uses three files though: requirements, design, and then tasks. The requirements doc is a bunch of statements that define all the edge cases you might not have originally thought of. Design looks at what is currently in the code, how the code implementation differs from the requirements, and what technical changes need to happen to resolve the difference. Then tasks breaks the very large end to end development flow up into smaller pieces that an LLM can realistically tackle. The agent then keeps track of it's work in the tasks file.
Realistically, I don't think that Harper's statement of "I get to play cookie clicker" is achievable, at least not for nontrivial tasks. Current LLM's still need a skilled human SDE in the loop. But Kiro does help that loop run a lot smoother and on much larger tasks than a traditional AI agent can tackle.
Thank you, I will certainly check this out because this is something I've been sort of doing, manually, but I am still struggling to get the right workflow.
This recent OpenAI presentation might resonate too then:
Prompt Engineering is dead (everything is a spec)
In an era where AI transforms software development, the most valuable skill isn't writing code - it's communicating intent with precision. This talk reveals how specifications, not prompts or code, are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and why spec-writing is the new superpower.
Drawing from production experience, we demonstrate how rigorous, versioned specifications serve as the source of truth that compiles to documentation, evaluations, model behaviors, and maybe even code.
Just as the US Constitution acts as a versioned spec with judicial review as its grader, AI systems need executable specifications that align both human teams and machine intelligence. We'll look at OpenAI's Model Spec as a real-world example.
FYI: I'm trying Kiro out now, and the IDE keeps popping open the integrated terminal window of its own accord. Has done it multiple times, including when I don't even have the IDE window focussed on my desktop. Every 5-10 minutes it seems.
Neither VSCode nor Cursor do this, so even if it's an extension triggering it somehow, the behaviour in Kiro is different to those other two.
Stay tuned! I think there is definitely room for a CLI version as well. That said, IDE's have a significant advantage over CLI because of the features available to them. For example, the reason why IDE's feel "slow" is often because they just come with more features: automatic linters and code formatters, type checkers, LSP servers.
An agent running in the IDE can make use of all this context to provide better results. So, for example, you will see Kiro automatically notice and attempt to resolve problems from the "Problems" tab in the IDE. Kiro will look at what files you have open and attempt to use that info to jump to the right context faster.
The way I describe it is that the ceiling for an IDE agent is a lot higher than a CLI agent, just because the IDE agent has more context info to work with. CLI agents are great too, but I think the IDE can go a lot further because it has more tools available, and more info about what you are doing, where you are working, etc
That's all old news. Claude Code and even Amazon Q CLI can leverage all this context through MCP as well, with connecting to LSP servers, computing repo-maps or code indexes, integrating with linters, etc.
In my opinion, CLIs have a higher ceiling, and then they are easy to integrate into CI/CD, run them in parallel, etc.
MCP is great, but it adds a lot of extra latency. The MCP servers themselves will stuff your context full of tool details, taking up valuable tokens that could be spent on code context. Then at runtime the LLM has to decide to call a tool, the tool call has to come back to your machine, the data is gathered and sent back to the LLM, then the LLM can act on that data. Multiply this by however many rounds of tool use the LLM decides it needs prior to taking action. If you are lucky the LLM will do a single round of parallel tool use, but not always.
The advantage of something more purpose built for gathering context from the IDE is that you can skip a lot of roundtrips. Knowing the user's intent upfront, the IDE can gather all the necessary context data preemptively, filter it down to a token efficient representation of just the relevant stuff, add it in the context preemptively along with the user's prompt, and there is a single trip to the LLM before the LLM gets to work.
But yeah I agree with your point about CLI capabilities for running in parallel, integrating in other places. There is totally room for both, I just think that when it comes to authoring code in the flow, the IDE approach feels a bit smoother to me.
I feel what you say is true only for auto-complete, which is no longer the ideal workflow for agentic coding. Otherwise the IDE doesn't know what it should include or not in the context, and you need an AI model to determine that.
What people do to avoid what you discussed, is multi-agents. The main agent can build up context, plan, than delegate execution to other agents, etc.
In my opinion, the benefit of the IDE is really just in the possibility of an improved UI/UX over a TUI.
There are still people not even using an editor, but rather using vibe-coding apps like lovable.
Also,I don't mean to be rude to cursor but the fact that they are literally just a vscode wrapper still, to this day makes me really crazy thinking that the value of an AI editor could be so high..
I think it was the lack of competition really, Cursor (IMO) always felt like the biggest player, I think there was continue.dev before that, but that's all I know before Cursor.
After Cursor became a hit, there are lot more things now like (Void editor?) etc.
Also, if you Find Vscode editor slow, try zed. But like my brother said to me when I was shilling zed, Vscode is just for manipulating texts and using LSP. He personally didn't feel like it was there any meaningful slowness to Vscode even though he had tried zed. Zed has Ai stuff too iirc
Now Sure, they could've created CLI, but there are a lot of really decent CLI like SST/opencode and even gemini cli. Though I have heard good things about claude code too.
Honestly, I just think that any efforts in anything is cool. I just like it when there are a lot of options and so things stay a little competitive I guess.
1) It's normal for Kiro (and almost every AI editor) to use a lot more CPU when you first start it up, because it is indexing your codebase in the background, for faster and more accurate results when you prompt. That indexing should complete at some point
2) On initial setup of Kiro it will import and install your plugins from VS Code. If you have a large number of plugins this continues in the background, and can be quite CPU heavy as it extracts and runs the installs for each plugin. This is a one time performance hit though.
3) If your computer is truly idle, most modern CPU's get throttled back to save power. When the CPU is throttled, even a tiny amount of CPU utilization can show up as a large percentage of the CPU, but that's just because the CPU has been throttled back to a very slow clock speed.
In my setup (minimal plugins, medium sized codebase, computer set to never idle the processor clock) I rarely see Kiro helper go above .4% CPU utilization, so if you are seeing high CPU it is likely for one of the above reasons.
I tried with a small project, it worked fine, no high CPU usage.
However with a large project, it seems that it indexed, then dropped CPU, then I started opening up files and working with them, then the CPU spiked again.
I'll look into this. Kiro is supposed to be doing progressive reindexing. When you make a change it should only have to reindex the files that changed. If you have any logs or other data you are willing to share, to help the team investigate you can use the "report a bug / suggest an idea" link at the bottom, or open an issue at: https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro/issues
Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.
I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin, which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some background task is running.
Nicely done. I particularly like the emphasis on writing specs which really is something new in the space and makes Kirk not just “Cursor clone”. This is something missing in Claude Code… the user needs to remember to ask Claude to update the specs.
How does Kirk deal with changes to the requirements? Are all the specs updated?
Currently specifications are mostly static documents. While they can be refreshed this is a more manual process, and if you do "vibe coding" via Kiro it can make code changes without updating the specs at all.
I find the best way to use specs is to progressively commit them into the repo as an append only "history" showing the gradual change of the project over time. You can use Kiro to modify an existing spec and update it to match the new intended state of the project, but this somehow feels a bit less valuable compared to having a historical record of all the design choices that led from where you started to where you now are.
I think in the long run Kiro will be able to serve both types of use: keeping a single authoritative library of specs for each feature, and keeping a historical record of mutations over time.
>overage charges for agentic interactions will be $0.04 per interaction, and if enabled, will begin consuming overages once your included amounts are used (1,000 interactions for Pro tier, 3,000 for Pro+ tier). Limits are applied at the user level. For example, if you are a Pro tier customer who uses 1,200 requests, your bill would show an overage charge of $8 (200 × $0.04). Overages for agentic interactions must be enabled prior to use.
What is defined as an interaction?
EDIT: RTFM
>Whenever you ask Kiro something, it consumes an agentic interaction. This includes chat, a single spec execution, and/or every time an agent hook executes. However, the work Kiro does to complete your request—such as calling other tools, or taking multiple attempts—does not count towards your interactions.
There is a model picker that currently allows you to switch between Claude Sonnet 4.0 and Claude Sonnet 3.7
And yes, Kiro is agentic, so it can (and often does) execute a long running multi-turn workflow in response to your interactions, however, the billing model is based on your manual interaction that kicks off the workflow (via chat, spec, or hook), even if that agent workflow takes many turns for Kiro to complete
Is this supposed to be a demo of how wide-ranging Kiro is or how accurate it is? Because the very first item in the screenshots is in a superposition of conflicting states from various parts of its description.
That said, thanks for being willing to demo what kinds of things it can do!
Kiro is created by an AWS team, and originates from AWS expertise. We are using Kiro internally as one of our recommended tools for development within AWS (and Amazon). So Kiro is an official AWS product, however, we are also keeping it slightly separated from the rest of core AWS.
For example, you can use Kiro without having any AWS account at all. Kiro has social login through Google and GitHub. Basically, Kiro is backed by AWS, but is it's own standalone product, and we hope to see it grow and appeal to a broader audience than just AWS customers.
Seems like social login isn't working for me on OSX. Just downloaded Kiro, clicked the Google option, allowed the app, and then get redirected back to http://localhost:3128/oauth/callback with an error "Error: AuthSSOServer: missing state".
Thanks for the report! I'll keep an eye on it. So far we aren't seeing any other reported issues, so it's possible that a browser extension, or something else in your setup is messing with the SSO flow.
Redirect back to localhost:3128 is normal, that's where Kiro is watching for a callback, but the missing state is not normal. Something may have stripped the info out of the callback before it occurred, which is why I suspect an extension in your browser.
It is also not working for me, this opens http://localhost:3128/oauth/callback?code=... but on Kiro interface I see "There was an error signing you in. Please try again"
After you said that google login didn't work, since I had also used github login, I wanted to tell that github login had worked for me, but you beat me to it!
I think Auth can be a bit of mess, but yes Its still absolutely great that I can just login with github and it just works, I am trying out Kiro right as we speak!
Can you comment on how the IDE performs on large codebases? Does the spec based approach help with it? Any examples you can give from experience at Amazon?
I've published a sample project that is medium sized, about 20k lines encompassing a game client, game server, and background service: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro This has been all developed by Kiro. The way Kiro is able to work in these larger projects is thanks to steering files like these:
And yes, the specs do help a lot. They help Kiro spend more time gathering context before getting to work, which helps the new features integrate into the existing codebase better, with less duplication, and more accuracy.
At this time Kiro is a standalone product that does not require an AWS account at all. Kiro is powered by Bedrock behind the scenes, but it has a layer of abstraction between Kiro and Bedrock, which includes system prompts and additional functionality. I can definitely take this as a feature request though!
We really need to add some more step by step docs for setting this up, but it's very similar to the Amazon Q Developer integration with AWS IAM Identity Center if you are familiar with that: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/sec...
I love the emphasis on specs here; this is something I do with Claude Code (maintain a set of specs in text as we work).
I always keep the readme and some basic architecture docs (using markdown/mermaid) updated as I go, and I often just work on those rather than on code with Claude, because I find the value it offers is less in code generation and more in helping me document the rubber ducking process into useful schematics and architecture.
What can Kiro offer that's meaningfully better than what I'm already doing? I can take my system anywhere Claude Code and my repos can go, using whatever editor I like. Does Kiro have some special sauce for making this approach work better? Maybe some DSL it uses for more succinct and actionable diagrams and plans?
As much as I like the idea, I find it so hard to abandon a process I've been working on for months, using tools I'm already productive with.
Also, will pricing essentially be bedrock pricing, or will there be a value-add margin tacked on?
> Does Kiro have some special sauce for making this approach work better?
I'd like to think so, but you'd have to compare the results to what you are currently doing to see how you feel about it. I personally love the format that it uses to define requirements, and the details of the software design docs that it writes (including mermaid diagrams)
> will pricing essentially be bedrock pricing, or will there be a value-add margin tacked on?
The pricing is a flat rate, with a cap on number of interactions per month. Each human driven "push" for Kiro to do something is an interaction toward your limit, but Kiro may work autonomously for many turns based on an interaction, and will produce significant amounts of code from a single interaction.
Ah, thanks for the pricing link. I saw 'Kiro is free to use during preview' or similar and assumed pricing is hidden.
At $39/month, is 3000 interactions a high limit? I use Claude Code on the $30 plan (I think), and routinely hit limits. I'm not ready to jump to the next tier, though. I think it's $200/month, and the NGO I work for isn't prepared to throw that kind of cash at developers (I'm second-rate here; the science comes first)
It's hard to directly compare, but 3000 interactions should be very, very high. Think of each of these 3000 interactions as you supplying a prompt that potentially runs for 3-5 minutes of Kiro iterating away on writing code. With appropriately sized prompts (most likely aided by spec mode), you could write a ridiculous amount of code.
For reference 3000 interactions * assumed 3 mins of AI work per interaction / 60 mins per hour / 8 working hours per day equals 18.75 working days of nonstop back to back AI coding. Typical month has 20-23 working days. But realistically you likely won't be using Kiro nonstop all day back to back, so 3000 interactions per month should more than cover your work month.
Here my problem with this: I don't want to be jumping an editor/IDE every 6 months, learning new key bindings and even more importantly, getting used to a completely new look.
In a space that moves as quickly as "AI" does, it is inevitable that a better and cheaper solution will pop up at some point. We kinda already see it with Cursor and Windsurf. I guess Claude Code is all the rage now and I personally think CLI/TUI is the way to go for anyone that has a similar view.
That said, I'm sure there's a very big user base (probably bigger than terminal group) that will enjoy using this and other GUI apps.
They're all based vscode, so the switching costs are fairly minimal? It'll get worse over time as they diverge, but at the moment they're all fairly similar AFAICT. It's starting to become noticeable that Cursor isn't picking up VSCode enhancements and fixes, but it's still quite minor.
Seems like Amazon started making this when Cursor was hot in the market, but now that CLI agents like Claude Code are taking over, Kiro will have an uphill battle.
It’s also not free or unlimited (though throttled) like Cursor and Claude Code using max plan.
I think IDE-based tools like Cursor, VS Code, etc, will win out in the long term, especially as the younger generation grows up.
In the short term though, I think CLI-based tools like Claude Code are taking off because hardcore developers see them as the last "vestige" they have in separating themselves from the "noobs." They know there's still a good portion of the public who don't know how to use the terminal, install packages, or even know what Linux is.
Which is kind of ironic since the Amazon Q Developer CLI (which is essentially Claude Code with a slightly different wrapper) was released long before Claude Code and seems to mostly be flying under the radar.
Claude Code really was at the right place at the right time. Cursor started putting new models under their MAX plan that charges per use and I started getting worse results with Cursor over time as they optimized costs. I started looking into Cline/RooCode when Cursor did this because I knew they were in the squeezing customers stage now. I used those for a while with Sonnet thru OpenRouter, but Anthropic had the genius plan of bundling Claude Code with their Max plan. That made a lot of users jump ship from Cursor and the difference is night and day for me. Yes I pay 5 times more than I did with cursor, but still less than using API credits and the results for me have been superior.
Not really, even at work I got to test couple different AI solutions and the experience is always slightly different, even if the editor is the same, for the most part. It's the tiny things like using the prompt template, or opening the panel. (I could, of course, make an attempt to customize the keybindings, but why bother when it changes so quickly.)
The entire idea that “I’m too cool to use an IDE” I find kind of dumb. I was using a Turbo C IDE in college in 1994, Visual Studio until 2019 and since then VSCode.
YUP! This is why I've settled on Aider and it's "IDE integration" (watches all files for comments that end in "AI!", which then invokes the AI). I can then use it with whatever editor I prefer. I view the vscode mono-culture as a bad thing. I also like I can use any AI backend I like, which is really how it should be: Vendor lock-in tools are bad, remember?
I guess you lose tab-completion suggestions, but I am not a fan of those compared to 'normal' tab-complete (if backed by an lang server). If I want AI, I'll write a short comment and invoke the tool explicitly.
EDIT: Of course, it really depends an your usecase. I maintain/upgrade C code libs and utils; I really cannot speak to what works best for your env! Webdev is truly a different world.
EDIT2: Can't leave this alone for some reason, the backend thing is a big deal. Switching between Claude/Gemini/Deekseek and even rando models like Qwen or Kimi is awesome, they can fill in each other's holes or unblock a model which is 'stuck'.
This is why you will have to pry vim and my own brain out of my cold dead hands.
It’s not just the IDE but the ML model you are selling yourself to. I see my colleagues atrophy before me. I see their tools melt in their hands. I am rapidly becoming the only person functionally capable of reason on my own. It’s very very weird.
When the model money dries up what’s going to happen?
I dunno. There's also a good chance that you just end up being left behind like graybeards that only wanted to code in C and assembler.
I too am old enough to have seen a lot of unnecessary tech change cycles, and one thing I've noticed about this industry is no matter how foolish a trend was, we almost never unwind it.
I love Claude Code too, and it definitely has it's place. I think that IDE's have a few advantages over CLI tools though. In specific the IDE has a lot more contextual information such as what files you have open, warnings from linters or type checkers, information from LSP, etc.
I think it is entirely possible to build a fantastic CLI tool for coding, and the CLI tools for coding already work well enough, but there is just more context info available inside of an IDE, therefore the ceiling is higher when working with an agent that runs inside of the IDE. Context is king for LLM results, and IDE's just have more context.
Over time I'm sure we'll see tools like Claude Code support everything that an IDE can do, but for now if you want to reach the same ceiling you still have to glue together a very custom setup with MCP tool use, and that has the downside of introducing additional tool use latency, compared to an IDE that is able to source context directly from the IDE's internal API, and provide that to the LLM nearly instantly.
Same here - in fact, I just recently cancelled my Cursor subscription because Claude Code + VSCode seems just as good. I think Cursor is a decent product and some of the UX it puts around LLM interaction is helpful - but I just can't really justifying paying Cursor to middleman my requests to LLM providers when Claude Pro is $20 / month.
I have a question. I do not like the concept of "agent mode" for AI. I'm a control freak and I want to control every line that gets committed because I am responsible for it and need to understand/visualize/memorize every part of codebases I work on.
Is Claude Code good for the "ask" flow? No, right?
The old flow before agent mode got added. Select some code, ask questions about it or give an instruction on editing it and then choose to accept the change.
As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.
Claude Code is definitely more agentic, but you can use it in a variety of ways. In Plan Mode it won't touch the code, and by default it asks you to accept every single diff. With IDE integration you can definitely just highlight some code and ask questions, I don't see why that workflow wouldn't work.
> As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.
> Am I right?
With cursor you get reasonably flexible control at many levels. You can have it only suggest changes that you have to apply manually or you can have it make automatic changes with various ways to review, change, reject or accept. I usually have the changes made automatically but don’t accept the changes automatically. Cursor has a UI that lets you review each edit individually, for the whole file or all files. Depending on the situation I will use whichever level is appropriate. The UI also allows you to revert changes or you can ask the AI to undo or rework a change that you just approved so there’s plenty of ways to do large changes without giving up control. There’s also a stop button you can use to interrupt mid-stream if the work it’s doing isn’t what you want. It isn’t flawless but I haven’t found myself in a corner where I couldn’t get back to a happy path.
We tend to allow this. But you can review the diff before you allow it. It seems easier to say "roll that back" or hit esc if you see it doing things you dont like and then correcting it. I have to say the velocity is insane of coding this way. We also commit a LOT and explicitly dont allow claude to push code ever. That way we can roll back if needed, but honestly it's pretty rare to need to. The MAX plan is a must to work this way though.
Unfortunately aider is showing its age. It is great for what it does, but better LLMs + "agentic" have shown that you can get more in the swe domain.
There was a paper recently where they had an LLM evolve tool harnesses and got ~20% more than w/ aider on the benchmark they used, so it's pretty clear that the models + tools (+better harness) are better than just aider.
Don't get me wrong, I love aider and I've been using it since the early days. I'm just commenting on the overall "gains" and imo they are higher with the latest tools (claude code, gemini, etc).
As for 1), I agree but you force the model to work within aider's constraints. Claude4 for example excels at the agentic flow and it's better at that than providing the diffs that aider expects.
As for the last sentence, I disagree. They are evolving the stack, and more importantly they are evolving both at the same time, stack + LLM. That's the main reason they all subsidise use atm, they are gathering data to improve both. If I were to place a bet right now, I'd say that provider_tool + provider_LLM > 3rd party tool + same model in the short, medium and long term.
It could be better. I think the PMs and investors and decision makers at these companies are running with a "we want to replace / automate developers" philosophy, while these tools are actually best at augmenting developers. And so they're sorta builing with this "I'll do everything and ask you for confirmation" (and basically encourage you to give me blanket permission).
In reality these tools would be best if they took a more socratic method, a more interactive pair programming approach. So instead of giving you a blanket diff to accept or refuse or "No, and here's some changes" -- it should be more dialog oriented.
Of all of them so far though, I think Claude Code is closest to this. IF you prompt it right you can have a much more interactive workflow, and I find that most productive.
> As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.
You’re sort of technically correct but I wouldn’t really describe it this way exactly. You have to proactively accept or reject all changes to your files in some way.
It is almost impossible to accidentally commit code you don’t want.
It’s not really an edit in the same sense as an unstated change. It doesn’t even really do that until you accept the result.
It’s basically saving you a UI step compared to ask mode with basically no downside.
Totally agreed, which is why I'm sticking with my editor (neovim) regardless of whatever AI thing is hot and using tools outside/analogous to it, currently claude code
people are trying to find a moat that will bind their userbase. Browsers, editors, apps etc. There must be a format that locks users in so they will try them all one after another
> Here my problem with this: I don't want to be jumping an editor/IDE every 6 months, learning new key bindings and even more importantly, getting used to a completely new look.
gptel is great, its one of the must have packages for Emacs and I'm pretty sure that with time it will be one of the reasons to use Emacs like org-mode has been for a long time.
For people wanting to get up and running with vanilla Emacs (instead of a distribution) so that they can try out gptel sometime this week, I recommend emacs-bedrock: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
And for a gptel backend Gemini is the fastest route (excluding something local) from generating an API key to using a LLM in Emacs (for free).
Bonus points because Emacs is useful for things other than coding you can use gptel on your notes or any buffer really to ask/talk about stuff.
Thanks for the link. I'm not an emacs user and I'm more in the search of something like opencode [1], but I think it's not polished enough yet. I actually want to contribute to open source, so maybe I should create my own thing, heh.
I love all of this experimentation in how to effectively use AIs to co-create output with human steering. This pattern, of the human human focusing on the high-level and the AI focusing on the low level feels like a big win.
In some sense, we are starting with a very high-level and gradually refining the idea to a lower and lower levels of detail. It is structured hierarchical thinking. Right now we are at 3 levels: requirement -> spec -> code. Exposing each of these layers as structured text documents (mostly Markdown right now it seems) is powerful since each level can be independently reviewed. You can review the spec before the code is written, then review the code before it gets checked in.
My intuition is that this pattern will be highly effective for coding. And if we prove that out at scale, we should start asking: how does this pattern translate to other activities? How will this affect law, medicine, insurance, etc. Software is the tip of the iceberg and if this works then there are many possible avenues to expand this approach, and many potential startups to serve a growing market.
The key will be managing all of the documents, the levels of abstraction and the review processes. This is a totally tractable problem.
Caylent has been testing this for quite some time and I have to say it's an interesting take. With claude code you can shift between planning and coding modes and this offers a similar approach. The speed is quite good and the results are solid. The spec approach is solid but it takes a learning curve. Some of the tooling and autojumps take a bit to get used to because they differ from the other IDE approaches.
Overall I do believe this has accelerated our development and I'm interested to see where it goes. I don't think it's a direct comparison to claude code or cursor - its a different approach with some overlap.
Many companies are considering IDEs the way to reach developers. Atom started the trend of next generation IDEs and VSCode consolidated most of the market. With the AI raising, people are looking to get usage, gathering data, and positioning models. An IDE provides you all of that.
AI seems to be a way to engage happy users to try new things. Kiro joins a growing list of projects:
- Kiro (AWS)
- VSCode + Copilot (Microsoft)
- Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)
- Cursor
- Trae (Alibaba)
- Zed
- etc.
I put Zed in a separate category in the past. Now with assistants / agents, it's playing on the same space.
The market is a bit saturated and tools like Claude Code gave some flexibility and an alternative for users. I tried Cursor in the past, and now I'm back to Helix / VSCode + Claude Code.
I love Zed as an editor/IDE without ANY AI/LLM features. I think the AI support in Zed is actually pretty decent and I'm still using it out of habit (actively trying to use more TUI for AI).
But at the same time, it's my biggest worry that they will continue on the AI and pollute the project with too much junk. I gotta trust the smart minds behind it will find a way to balance this trend.
I got to play with this for the past week, and it's surprisingly good from an angle of "does a lot of the context engineering work for you." It enforces a rigor that I don't usually bring to vibe coding...
Thanks so much for your feedback Corey! That's one of the big goals of Kiro: to add a bit more of the rigor required to keep your code projects sane as they grow over time. I think Kiro hits the best of both worlds: the easy fun of "vibe coding" at first but then when its time to do some software engineering, Kiro is there to help dig deep into the technical requirements, write the architectural design, and break the big project up into reasonable tasks.
That's been my experience as well. Makes sense, there's little training data available and the (public) docs and (first-party) tooling remain dreadful.
It has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the subscription is better value than Claude Code, but hard to tell.
It supports MCP as well.
Amazon Q also has a VC Code and IntelliJ Idea plugin too, Kiro goes beyond what you can do as a plugin in VS Code though, similar to why Cursor had to fork VS Code.
That sounds too good to be true, and it seems like they are indeed introducing a usage system similar to their competitors next month?
> Starting August 1, 2025, we’re introducing a new pricing plan for Amazon Q Developer designed to make things simpler and more valuable for developers.
> Pro Tier: Expanded limits $19/mo. per user
> 1,000 agentic requests per month included (starting 8/1/2025)
So I am pretty sure that there is some aws/amazon service which can provide gpu's / model inference too.
I read it (I think) in one of the comment that
There is a model picker that currently allows you to switch between Claude Sonnet 4.0 and Claude Sonnet 3.7
So is this just using Claude?
I really thought that the advantages of using Kiro might really be that of the leverage that Amazon Gpu's infrastructure could provide, maybe even some discounts to lure people to Kiro.
I am pretty sure that a lot of people will ask you the same question, But I would really appreciate it if you could answer me this question in preferably simple terms:
"Why Kiro? Why not all the other stuff that has come before it and the stuff that will come after it"
Also I am really having some dejavu but while writing this comment, has the title of this post changed, I swear I saw something written in the header with Amazon and now I don't see it. honestly, I am really being so off-topic but after seeing this name change of the post, I really wish if that there was some website that could track all the name changes of posts that happen in HN, because I was completely baffled by this name change or I am being totally paranoid.
My suspicions were right that the name had something to do with amazon because I went into this thread thinking about Amazon's unique position in this market.
Unless it offers me something substantially better than VSCode, I am not gonna switch and it has a lot to do with unsupported extensions. For now, I think UX preference has to be CLI with web gui wrapper where you can pick models, agents, requirements, etc and let that run anywhere, even headless. I don’t like how these guys (as in all the VSCode wrappers) are trying to sucker people onto their platform to lock you in.
what are the unsupported extensions? i thought the support had to do with marketplace access (search / download / update) but if you already have the vsix it can be installed in any vscode fork
Some of Microsoft's extensions are licensed such that they may only be used with their own products (i.e. the official VS Code they offer for download, etc.). This already affects Cursor for example:
This doesn't support development containers (https://containers.dev), which means I can't insulate my machine from AI tooling. Not keen on this unless it's somehow earth-shattering.
I've been testing Kiro for a few months, and yes, it's an agentic IDE like many others. However, a lot of the features are different - the spec driven development is a game changer. It feels like you're truly software engineering versus vibing - you break a problem into small, solvable steps using specs. So are agent hooks - there are great use cases like updating Asana statuses or syncing your design system with Figma.
So I'm glad there are more agentic dev tools coming out, but can we please stop making entirely new IDEs and start integrating as plugins to well-established (and some already paid for) IDEs we already use? Webstorm/other Jetbrains, VS Code, etc.
It is a huge hassle to match my existing settings, which I've spent countless hours tweaking over the years, with a new editor that can't import them. :(
I use Roo code with orchestrator(Boomerang) mode which pretty much has similar workflow. The orchestrator calls the architect to design the specs, and after iterating and agreeing on the approach, it is handed over to Code mode to execute the tasks. Google Gemini 2.5 pro is pretty good at orchestration due to its 1M context and I use claude sonnet 4 for code mode.
What else does Kiro do differently?
Edit: The hooks feature looks nifty. How is the memory management handled? Any codebase indexing etc? Support to add external MCP servers like context7 etc?
I'm already burnt from amazon Q which was forced onto us in an alpha state in my workplace - was miles behind competitors for a full year, before we finally won the battle to move back to co-pilot.
Going to take a while before I trust any AWS AI related tooling won't just be abandoned / mis-managed after my prior experience.
I really like that the testimonials are linked directly to the Github accounts of the contributors. I've seen a lot of websites where it's questionable at best whether the people reviewing the product even exist.
It's also interesting that the pricing is in terms of "interactions" rather than tokens. I don't believe I've seen that before.
With the plugin. CC runs in a terminal on the sidebar. The plugin does not only provide diff view for CC edits, it also gives CC access to diagnosis and all other IDE capabilities through MCP.
Would appreciate a video of someone adding a feature to an existing project, just to get a feel for what the tool does. The long blog post gets lost in the sauce, would love a short 5 minute video.
Is there any way to move the chat window to the primary side bar? Having two side bars open takes up a lot of space. Not sure why this pattern persists in these VScode forks.
Generally in VSCode and its clones you can drag the window anywhere you like. I've been using my Copilot in the lower area which spans multiple panels, to give myself a little more viewing space.
I'm a little confused about how pricing works here. What is an 'agentic interaction' and how does that translate to dollars? And how does this work with models that are differently priced???
does this have any carveouts for CDK or other aws services? I've found that sonnet sometimes struggles to know what params to use, while amazon Q despite being on paper a worse model, can. It seems this uses sonnet, but are there any adjustments?
I tried Kiro just to test the tool and I was able to create a small order application. I liked it that that it created the documentation including planning and test scenarios. I will continue using the tool to create more complex apps.
Not amazed! Tell me one good reason I should use it?
Lets see EU US data privacy shield gone. Aws a bunch of open source tools gobbled together with proprietary source. Trust in made in US cloud platform tools is gone!
This is exactly how I've been building software with AI lately. Getting AI to create a detailed plan with phases, then implement and use a separate AI to review the code. It works quite well! Curious to see how well it works when implemented directly in the IDE
Realistically, none of the models can function fully autonomously at this point. You still need a skilled human at the helm. However, AI tools definitely change how the human works. I find that I spend a lot less time thinking about easy things, and a lot more time thinking about hard things.
Basically, the AI fast forwards through the easy stuff and I just spend all day jumping directly from hard problem to hard problem.
No autocomplete? Why? I mean is the current trend to leave all the control from the experienced dev hands and just review the final code? Not my cup of tea, I'll keep using Cursor and "vibe code" with smart rewrites
Kiro does have autocomplete. It's just not advertised on the product page as a star feature.
In my experience using Kiro you are still going to be hands on with the code. Personally I choose to turn AI powered autocomplete off because when I do touch the code manually it's usually for the purposes of working on something tricky that AI would likely not get right in autocomplete either.
However, the Kiro autocomplete is average in capability in my experience, and you can absolutely use it to write code by hand as well.
Big opportunity to be the first open source model agnostic Claude Code with widespread adoption. You’ll be the vim, the Linux, the nginx, the MySQL of agentic coding. Who will it be? It’s wide open right now.
This is much more tricky than you'd think. Claude Code and other similar tools only work as well as they do because the prompts that power it have been tuned to match a specific model.
When you make a tool that is "model agnostic" you also make a tool that is unable to play to the individual strengths of each model, or you set yourself up for a massive, multiplicative effort of trying to tune your tool to every single popular model out there, even though some of the models are drastically less capable than others.
Too late to the party. Feels like the market has moved onto Claude Code and terminal agents. I use Claude Code extensively and love the flexibility and fluidity. Also works well through the terminal integration in IDE.
Because collecting signals from the people that use these systems is extremely valuable. This kind of data is almost impossible to gather unless you own such a product. And those that do probably won't sell to the competition. So, it makes sense that everyone is in the me too phase.
Goog is even heavily subsidising this. Anthropic is likely doing it with their top tiers as well. Even the small ones @20$ most likely did in the beginning.
All the tech companies have a lot of software developers working there and they always have a ton of projects around software development and deployment that they've released. It's been new that they've been _monetizing them_, but that pretty much has to be done for AI tooling because of inferencing costs....
- Created by an AWS team but aws logo is barely visible at the bottom.
- Actually cute logo and branding.
- Focuses on the lead devs front and center (which HN loves). Makes it seem less like a corporation and more like 2 devs working on their project / or an actual startup.
- The comment tone of "hey ive been working on this for a year" also makes it seem as if there weren't 10 6-pagers written to make it happen (maybe there weren't?).
- flashy landing page
Props to the team. Wish there were more projects like this to branch out of AWS. E.g. Lightsail should've been launched like this.
What is the difference between kiro and having a rule file in claude code / cursor / cline saying « always start designing before coding. Create a .md file for specs, ask the user for it if it is not there? ». You can just prompt the specs or whatever feature is in this IDE.
Impressive to see an AI IDE tackle the real world complexity of software development. Love the separation of modes- Vibe for ideation, Spec for clarity, and Agent Hooks for ongoing maintenance. The spec-driven approach feels like a natural evolution beyond the typical AI prototype tools. Excited to try it out on a live project!
With my experience with Amazon Q in the AWS console (100% useless, worse than a Google search), I can only assume that this Kiro product will suck and not be a market leader.
As a customer I have no incentive to try it.
I think that reputation is 100% Amazon’s fault. When all you do is ship half-baked rushed products your customers will assume your next big thing sucks because that’s the reputation you built for yourself.
AWS really shot themselves in the foot with naming everything “Amazon Q <insert suffix here>”. The Q that’s in the console is completely and entirely different from the “Q Developer” and other AI products that AWS is launching.
The Q Developer CLI, Q Developer IDE plugins, and now Kiro are pretty much just wrappers around Claude Sonnet 3.7/4, and work just as well as them.
Given the rapidly-changing state of AI, "half-baked" is a moving target. The Q console support was never great, but it's materially worse than it was a year ago, relative to what could be built today.
Kiro is built for developers who thinks beyond just code snippets. If you care about specs, architecture, and long term maintainability, it’s worth a serious look.
I think this is where the stickiness is with generation; very little chance I’m switching from Claude Code unless something exceptionally better comes along at this point. Assuming I’m not abnormal, this is a huge win for Anthropic.
So we have another ugly VSCode clone with the same legal/support issues as all the other clones, but without any vibe-coding worthy assists like voice dictation/control or any other major differentiator. Just another "me too" project from AWS to scratch some product manager itch and commoditize the complement of some competitor.
Just this morning, Cursor was giving me a ton of incorrect tab completions. When I use prompts, it tends to break more than it fixes. It's still a lot faster to write by hand. Lots of libraries that take *arguments in Python also cannot be groked by AI.
At work it's supremely unhelpful. Giant C++ codebase, big enough to choke even traditional analysis tools like IntelliSense, lots of proprietary libraries.
I have found it extremely useful for spinning up personal projects though.
My wife bought us Claude subscriptions and she's been straight-up vibe coding an educational game for our son with impressive results (she is a UX designer so a lot more attuned to vibes than gen-pop). I'm picking up some computational physics research threads I dropped in grad school and Claude Code has been incredible at everything besides physics and HPC. Define and parse an input file format, integrate I/O libraries, turn my slapdash notes into LaTeX with nice TiKz diagrams, etc.
Hoping I can transfer over some insights to make it more helpful at work.
Important note from the FAQ:
> For users who access Kiro with Pro or Pro+ tiers once they are available, your content is not used to train any underlying foundation models (FMs). AWS might collect and use client-side telemetry and usage metrics for service improvement purposes. You can opt out of this data collection by adjusting your settings in the IDE. For the Kiro Free tier and during preview, your content, including code snippets, conversations, and file contents open in the IDE, unless explicitly opted out, may be used to enhance and improve the quality of FMs. Your content will not be used if you use the opt-out mechanism described in the documentation. If you have an Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription and access Kiro through your AWS account with the Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription, then Kiro will not use your content for service improvement. For more information, see Service Improvement.
https://kiro.dev/faq/
Hello folks! I've been working on Kiro for nearly a year now. Happy to chat about some of the things that make it unique in the IDE space. We've added a few powerful things that I think make it a bit different from other similar AI editors.
In specific, I'm really proud of "spec driven development", which is based on the internal processes that software development teams at Amazon use to build very large technical projects. Kiro can take your basic "vibe coding" prompt, and expand it into deep technical requirements, a design document (with diagrams), and a task list to break down large projects into smaller, more realistic chunks of work.
I've had a ton of fun not just working on Kiro, but also coding with Kiro. I've also published a sample project I built while working on Kiro. It's a fairly extensive codebase for an infinite crafting game, almost 95% AI coded, thanks to the power of Kiro: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro
> It's a fairly extensive codebase for an infinite crafting game, almost 95% AI coded, thanks to the power of Kiro: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro
This, along with the "CHALLENGE.md" and "ROADMAP.md" document, is an incredibly cool way to show off your project and to give people a playground to use to try it out. The game idea itself is pretty interesting too.
It would be awesome if I ... didn't have to deal with AWS to use it. I guess maybe that might be a good use case for agentic coding: "Hey, Kiro - can you make this thing just use a local database and my Anthropic API key?"
Complaining aside though, I think that's just such a cool framework for a demo. Nice idea.
Thanks a lot! I plan to fork the project and make a generic version that runs entirely locally using your GPU to do everything. My early tests ran pretty well on NVIDIA 5070. So that's next on my project list to open source in my free time. The only thing more fun that building an AI agent, is using it to build your own ideas!
I don't know if this is feedback for Kiro per se or more feedback for this category of applications as a whole, but I've personally noticed that the biggest barrier holding me back from giving an earnest look at new coding agents are the custom rules I've set up w/ my existing agents. I have extensively used Copilot, Continue, Cursor, Cline, Aider, Roo Code, and Claude Code. I've just finished porting my rules over to Claude Code and this is something I do not want to do again [even if it's as simple as dragging and dropping files].
Companies would benefit a lot by creating better onboarding flows that migrate users from other applications. It should either bring in the rules 1:1 or have an llm agent transform them into a format that works better for the agent.
You will be happy to find out that Kiro is quite good at this! One of my favorite features is "Steering Rules". Kiro can help you write steering rules for your projects, and the steering rules that it auto generates are actually super great for large projects. You can see some examples of auto generated steering files here in one of my open source projects: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro/tree/main/.kiro...
Also these steering rules are just markdown files, so you can just drop your other rules files from other tools into the `.kiro/steering` directory, and they work as is.
“I really don’t want to do X”
“Kirk is actually quite good at this: you just have to do X”
“…”
I just have a “neutral” guidance markdown setup written in a repo.
Then I add it as a git submodule to my projects and tell whatever agents to look at @llm-shared/ and update its own rule file(s) accordingly
Agents.md is at least used by both codex and GitHub copilot. VSCode has its own thing for instruction files and Claude.md is also its own thing :(
Not Kiro related, but do your Claude Code version of rules end up as CLAUDE.md files in various locations?
Or a proper standard like MCP was for agentic tool use, this time for context setup...
Problems w auth / security in MCP skeeve me out. For that reason, I really don't want to invest in workflows that depend on MCP and have steered clear. But I'd be grateful for well-informed comments / advice on that front.
As for a hypothetical new "context setup" protocol like you posit, I suspect it'd benefit from the "cognitive tools" ideas in this awesome paper / project: <https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering>
^ inspiring stuff
in the early days of building something like that, would love to talk for 10 minutes and get your advice if you have the time? I couldn't find your email but mine is in my profile.
Have you documented how you built this project using Kiro? Your learnings may help us get the best out of Kiro as we experiment with it for our medium+ size projects.
I've got a longer personal blogpost coming soon!
But in the meantime I'm also the author of the "Learn by Playing" guide in the Kiro docs. It goes step by step through using Kiro on this codebase, in the `challenge` branch. You can see how Kiro performs on a series of tasks starting with light things like basic vibe coding to update an HTML page, then slightly deeper things like fixing some bugs that I deliberately left in the code, then even deeper to a full fledged project to add email verification and password reset across client, server, and infrastructure as code. There is also an intro to using hooks, MCP, and steering files to completely customize the behavior of Kiro.
Guide link here: https://kiro.dev/docs/guides/learn-by-playing/
Is it something similar to Harper Reed's "My LLM codegen workflow atm"?
https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
Actually yes! I saw this post some months ago, and thought to myself: "Wow this is really close to what we've been building". Kiro uses three files though: requirements, design, and then tasks. The requirements doc is a bunch of statements that define all the edge cases you might not have originally thought of. Design looks at what is currently in the code, how the code implementation differs from the requirements, and what technical changes need to happen to resolve the difference. Then tasks breaks the very large end to end development flow up into smaller pieces that an LLM can realistically tackle. The agent then keeps track of it's work in the tasks file.
Realistically, I don't think that Harper's statement of "I get to play cookie clicker" is achievable, at least not for nontrivial tasks. Current LLM's still need a skilled human SDE in the loop. But Kiro does help that loop run a lot smoother and on much larger tasks than a traditional AI agent can tackle.
Thank you, I will certainly check this out because this is something I've been sort of doing, manually, but I am still struggling to get the right workflow.
This recent OpenAI presentation might resonate too then:
Prompt Engineering is dead (everything is a spec)
In an era where AI transforms software development, the most valuable skill isn't writing code - it's communicating intent with precision. This talk reveals how specifications, not prompts or code, are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and why spec-writing is the new superpower.
Drawing from production experience, we demonstrate how rigorous, versioned specifications serve as the source of truth that compiles to documentation, evaluations, model behaviors, and maybe even code.
Just as the US Constitution acts as a versioned spec with judicial review as its grader, AI systems need executable specifications that align both human teams and machine intelligence. We'll look at OpenAI's Model Spec as a real-world example.
https://youtu.be/8rABwKRsec4?si=waiZj9CnqsX9TXrM
FYI: I'm trying Kiro out now, and the IDE keeps popping open the integrated terminal window of its own accord. Has done it multiple times, including when I don't even have the IDE window focussed on my desktop. Every 5-10 minutes it seems.
Neither VSCode nor Cursor do this, so even if it's an extension triggering it somehow, the behaviour in Kiro is different to those other two.
Why build an editor and not a CLI. VS code is really slow for me and I would have preferred a CLI.
They already have a CLI that is similar to Claude Code: Amazon Q CLI, you can download it here: https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli
It actually has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the subscription is better value than Claude Code, but hard to tell.
"They" built Amazon Q? I assume you mean there are CLI agent tools, unrelated to this project, such as Amazon Q.
Stay tuned! I think there is definitely room for a CLI version as well. That said, IDE's have a significant advantage over CLI because of the features available to them. For example, the reason why IDE's feel "slow" is often because they just come with more features: automatic linters and code formatters, type checkers, LSP servers.
An agent running in the IDE can make use of all this context to provide better results. So, for example, you will see Kiro automatically notice and attempt to resolve problems from the "Problems" tab in the IDE. Kiro will look at what files you have open and attempt to use that info to jump to the right context faster.
The way I describe it is that the ceiling for an IDE agent is a lot higher than a CLI agent, just because the IDE agent has more context info to work with. CLI agents are great too, but I think the IDE can go a lot further because it has more tools available, and more info about what you are doing, where you are working, etc
> For example, the reason why IDE's feel "slow" is often because they just come with more features:
IDEs don't feel slow, they ARE slow
because written in HTML and Javascript
go and try Delphi from 2005, it's blazing fast (and more functional...)
That's all old news. Claude Code and even Amazon Q CLI can leverage all this context through MCP as well, with connecting to LSP servers, computing repo-maps or code indexes, integrating with linters, etc.
In my opinion, CLIs have a higher ceiling, and then they are easy to integrate into CI/CD, run them in parallel, etc.
MCP is great, but it adds a lot of extra latency. The MCP servers themselves will stuff your context full of tool details, taking up valuable tokens that could be spent on code context. Then at runtime the LLM has to decide to call a tool, the tool call has to come back to your machine, the data is gathered and sent back to the LLM, then the LLM can act on that data. Multiply this by however many rounds of tool use the LLM decides it needs prior to taking action. If you are lucky the LLM will do a single round of parallel tool use, but not always.
The advantage of something more purpose built for gathering context from the IDE is that you can skip a lot of roundtrips. Knowing the user's intent upfront, the IDE can gather all the necessary context data preemptively, filter it down to a token efficient representation of just the relevant stuff, add it in the context preemptively along with the user's prompt, and there is a single trip to the LLM before the LLM gets to work.
But yeah I agree with your point about CLI capabilities for running in parallel, integrating in other places. There is totally room for both, I just think that when it comes to authoring code in the flow, the IDE approach feels a bit smoother to me.
I feel what you say is true only for auto-complete, which is no longer the ideal workflow for agentic coding. Otherwise the IDE doesn't know what it should include or not in the context, and you need an AI model to determine that.
What people do to avoid what you discussed, is multi-agents. The main agent can build up context, plan, than delegate execution to other agents, etc.
In my opinion, the benefit of the IDE is really just in the possibility of an improved UI/UX over a TUI.
There are still people not even using an editor, but rather using vibe-coding apps like lovable.
Also,I don't mean to be rude to cursor but the fact that they are literally just a vscode wrapper still, to this day makes me really crazy thinking that the value of an AI editor could be so high..
I think it was the lack of competition really, Cursor (IMO) always felt like the biggest player, I think there was continue.dev before that, but that's all I know before Cursor.
After Cursor became a hit, there are lot more things now like (Void editor?) etc.
Also, if you Find Vscode editor slow, try zed. But like my brother said to me when I was shilling zed, Vscode is just for manipulating texts and using LSP. He personally didn't feel like it was there any meaningful slowness to Vscode even though he had tried zed. Zed has Ai stuff too iirc
Now Sure, they could've created CLI, but there are a lot of really decent CLI like SST/opencode and even gemini cli. Though I have heard good things about claude code too.
Honestly, I just think that any efforts in anything is cool. I just like it when there are a lot of options and so things stay a little competitive I guess.
Why not deploy the game? I'd love to try it
nice! Can't agree more on Vibe Speccing.
I wrote more about Spec Driven AI development here: https://lukebechtel.com/blog/vibe-speccing
While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for no reason.
A few things:
1) It's normal for Kiro (and almost every AI editor) to use a lot more CPU when you first start it up, because it is indexing your codebase in the background, for faster and more accurate results when you prompt. That indexing should complete at some point
2) On initial setup of Kiro it will import and install your plugins from VS Code. If you have a large number of plugins this continues in the background, and can be quite CPU heavy as it extracts and runs the installs for each plugin. This is a one time performance hit though.
3) If your computer is truly idle, most modern CPU's get throttled back to save power. When the CPU is throttled, even a tiny amount of CPU utilization can show up as a large percentage of the CPU, but that's just because the CPU has been throttled back to a very slow clock speed.
In my setup (minimal plugins, medium sized codebase, computer set to never idle the processor clock) I rarely see Kiro helper go above .4% CPU utilization, so if you are seeing high CPU it is likely for one of the above reasons.
Thanks for the reply. It was the indexing.
Is there any way to control this? I have my files.watcherExclude setting, does it respect that?
I believe that the file indexing exclusion is based on .gitignore, not files.watcherExclude, but let me check on that and confirm.
I tried with a small project, it worked fine, no high CPU usage.
However with a large project, it seems that it indexed, then dropped CPU, then I started opening up files and working with them, then the CPU spiked again.
I'll look into this. Kiro is supposed to be doing progressive reindexing. When you make a change it should only have to reindex the files that changed. If you have any logs or other data you are willing to share, to help the team investigate you can use the "report a bug / suggest an idea" link at the bottom, or open an issue at: https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro/issues
Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.
I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin, which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some background task is running.
See the NathanKP comment on the (grand parent post?), It was the indexing which was causing the resource utiliazation.
For a large project, it seems to still be using high CPU (maybe continuously indexing)
Nicely done. I particularly like the emphasis on writing specs which really is something new in the space and makes Kirk not just “Cursor clone”. This is something missing in Claude Code… the user needs to remember to ask Claude to update the specs.
How does Kirk deal with changes to the requirements? Are all the specs updated?
Currently specifications are mostly static documents. While they can be refreshed this is a more manual process, and if you do "vibe coding" via Kiro it can make code changes without updating the specs at all.
I find the best way to use specs is to progressively commit them into the repo as an append only "history" showing the gradual change of the project over time. You can use Kiro to modify an existing spec and update it to match the new intended state of the project, but this somehow feels a bit less valuable compared to having a historical record of all the design choices that led from where you started to where you now are.
I think in the long run Kiro will be able to serve both types of use: keeping a single authoritative library of specs for each feature, and keeping a historical record of mutations over time.
Is this being powered by any specific model?
>overage charges for agentic interactions will be $0.04 per interaction, and if enabled, will begin consuming overages once your included amounts are used (1,000 interactions for Pro tier, 3,000 for Pro+ tier). Limits are applied at the user level. For example, if you are a Pro tier customer who uses 1,200 requests, your bill would show an overage charge of $8 (200 × $0.04). Overages for agentic interactions must be enabled prior to use.
What is defined as an interaction?
EDIT: RTFM
>Whenever you ask Kiro something, it consumes an agentic interaction. This includes chat, a single spec execution, and/or every time an agent hook executes. However, the work Kiro does to complete your request—such as calling other tools, or taking multiple attempts—does not count towards your interactions.
There is a model picker that currently allows you to switch between Claude Sonnet 4.0 and Claude Sonnet 3.7
And yes, Kiro is agentic, so it can (and often does) execute a long running multi-turn workflow in response to your interactions, however, the billing model is based on your manual interaction that kicks off the workflow (via chat, spec, or hook), even if that agent workflow takes many turns for Kiro to complete
Is this supposed to be a demo of how wide-ranging Kiro is or how accurate it is? Because the very first item in the screenshots is in a superposition of conflicting states from various parts of its description.
That said, thanks for being willing to demo what kinds of things it can do!
Hello! What is the connection with AWS? Do you work for AWS? Is this going to be some official AWS product, backed by Amazon Q or Bedrock?
Kiro is created by an AWS team, and originates from AWS expertise. We are using Kiro internally as one of our recommended tools for development within AWS (and Amazon). So Kiro is an official AWS product, however, we are also keeping it slightly separated from the rest of core AWS.
For example, you can use Kiro without having any AWS account at all. Kiro has social login through Google and GitHub. Basically, Kiro is backed by AWS, but is it's own standalone product, and we hope to see it grow and appeal to a broader audience than just AWS customers.
Seems like social login isn't working for me on OSX. Just downloaded Kiro, clicked the Google option, allowed the app, and then get redirected back to http://localhost:3128/oauth/callback with an error "Error: AuthSSOServer: missing state".
Thanks for the report! I'll keep an eye on it. So far we aren't seeing any other reported issues, so it's possible that a browser extension, or something else in your setup is messing with the SSO flow.
Redirect back to localhost:3128 is normal, that's where Kiro is watching for a callback, but the missing state is not normal. Something may have stripped the info out of the callback before it occurred, which is why I suspect an extension in your browser.
Will keep an eye on this though!
It is also not working for me, this opens http://localhost:3128/oauth/callback?code=... but on Kiro interface I see "There was an error signing you in. Please try again"
FWIW Github login worked, only extensions I run is a password manager and Kagi.
After you said that google login didn't work, since I had also used github login, I wanted to tell that github login had worked for me, but you beat me to it!
I think Auth can be a bit of mess, but yes Its still absolutely great that I can just login with github and it just works, I am trying out Kiro right as we speak!
Thanks for the additional info!
Can you comment on how the IDE performs on large codebases? Does the spec based approach help with it? Any examples you can give from experience at Amazon?
It works great in really large codebases!
I've published a sample project that is medium sized, about 20k lines encompassing a game client, game server, and background service: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro This has been all developed by Kiro. The way Kiro is able to work in these larger projects is thanks to steering files like these:
- Structure, helps Kiro navigate the large project: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro/blob/main/.kiro...
- Tech, helps Kiro stay consistent with the tech it uses in a large project: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro/blob/main/.kiro...
And yes, the specs do help a lot. They help Kiro spend more time gathering context before getting to work, which helps the new features integrate into the existing codebase better, with less duplication, and more accuracy.
How much are you using Kiro to improve itself? 100% of the time? 10% of the time? Never?
Are there plans to let AWS customers hook this up to Bedrock / use models through that?
At this time Kiro is a standalone product that does not require an AWS account at all. Kiro is powered by Bedrock behind the scenes, but it has a layer of abstraction between Kiro and Bedrock, which includes system prompts and additional functionality. I can definitely take this as a feature request though!
If this integrated with AWS for billing, usage, and IAM purposes it would be a no brainer to have my team trying this out today.
You can do that!
There is an AWS IAM Identity Center option for login as well: https://kiro.dev/docs/reference/auth-methods/#aws-iam-identi...
We really need to add some more step by step docs for setting this up, but it's very similar to the Amazon Q Developer integration with AWS IAM Identity Center if you are familiar with that: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/sec...
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I love the emphasis on specs here; this is something I do with Claude Code (maintain a set of specs in text as we work).
I always keep the readme and some basic architecture docs (using markdown/mermaid) updated as I go, and I often just work on those rather than on code with Claude, because I find the value it offers is less in code generation and more in helping me document the rubber ducking process into useful schematics and architecture.
What can Kiro offer that's meaningfully better than what I'm already doing? I can take my system anywhere Claude Code and my repos can go, using whatever editor I like. Does Kiro have some special sauce for making this approach work better? Maybe some DSL it uses for more succinct and actionable diagrams and plans?
As much as I like the idea, I find it so hard to abandon a process I've been working on for months, using tools I'm already productive with.
Also, will pricing essentially be bedrock pricing, or will there be a value-add margin tacked on?
> Does Kiro have some special sauce for making this approach work better?
I'd like to think so, but you'd have to compare the results to what you are currently doing to see how you feel about it. I personally love the format that it uses to define requirements, and the details of the software design docs that it writes (including mermaid diagrams)
> will pricing essentially be bedrock pricing, or will there be a value-add margin tacked on?
The pricing is a flat rate, with a cap on number of interactions per month. Each human driven "push" for Kiro to do something is an interaction toward your limit, but Kiro may work autonomously for many turns based on an interaction, and will produce significant amounts of code from a single interaction.
More details here: https://kiro.dev/pricing/
Ah, thanks for the pricing link. I saw 'Kiro is free to use during preview' or similar and assumed pricing is hidden.
At $39/month, is 3000 interactions a high limit? I use Claude Code on the $30 plan (I think), and routinely hit limits. I'm not ready to jump to the next tier, though. I think it's $200/month, and the NGO I work for isn't prepared to throw that kind of cash at developers (I'm second-rate here; the science comes first)
It's hard to directly compare, but 3000 interactions should be very, very high. Think of each of these 3000 interactions as you supplying a prompt that potentially runs for 3-5 minutes of Kiro iterating away on writing code. With appropriately sized prompts (most likely aided by spec mode), you could write a ridiculous amount of code.
For reference 3000 interactions * assumed 3 mins of AI work per interaction / 60 mins per hour / 8 working hours per day equals 18.75 working days of nonstop back to back AI coding. Typical month has 20-23 working days. But realistically you likely won't be using Kiro nonstop all day back to back, so 3000 interactions per month should more than cover your work month.
CC have $20 and $100 and a $200 tiers
Here my problem with this: I don't want to be jumping an editor/IDE every 6 months, learning new key bindings and even more importantly, getting used to a completely new look.
In a space that moves as quickly as "AI" does, it is inevitable that a better and cheaper solution will pop up at some point. We kinda already see it with Cursor and Windsurf. I guess Claude Code is all the rage now and I personally think CLI/TUI is the way to go for anyone that has a similar view.
That said, I'm sure there's a very big user base (probably bigger than terminal group) that will enjoy using this and other GUI apps.
They're all based vscode, so the switching costs are fairly minimal? It'll get worse over time as they diverge, but at the moment they're all fairly similar AFAICT. It's starting to become noticeable that Cursor isn't picking up VSCode enhancements and fixes, but it's still quite minor.
only if you use vscode, I think TUIs are a better option since a lot of us use other ides than vscode
Seems like Amazon started making this when Cursor was hot in the market, but now that CLI agents like Claude Code are taking over, Kiro will have an uphill battle.
It’s also not free or unlimited (though throttled) like Cursor and Claude Code using max plan.
I think IDE-based tools like Cursor, VS Code, etc, will win out in the long term, especially as the younger generation grows up.
In the short term though, I think CLI-based tools like Claude Code are taking off because hardcore developers see them as the last "vestige" they have in separating themselves from the "noobs." They know there's still a good portion of the public who don't know how to use the terminal, install packages, or even know what Linux is.
I think what is going to win is a tool independent to your ide to run your agents, it could be a cli or a gui.
Which is kind of ironic since the Amazon Q Developer CLI (which is essentially Claude Code with a slightly different wrapper) was released long before Claude Code and seems to mostly be flying under the radar.
Claude Code really was at the right place at the right time. Cursor started putting new models under their MAX plan that charges per use and I started getting worse results with Cursor over time as they optimized costs. I started looking into Cline/RooCode when Cursor did this because I knew they were in the squeezing customers stage now. I used those for a while with Sonnet thru OpenRouter, but Anthropic had the genius plan of bundling Claude Code with their Max plan. That made a lot of users jump ship from Cursor and the difference is night and day for me. Yes I pay 5 times more than I did with cursor, but still less than using API credits and the results for me have been superior.
Not really, even at work I got to test couple different AI solutions and the experience is always slightly different, even if the editor is the same, for the most part. It's the tiny things like using the prompt template, or opening the panel. (I could, of course, make an attempt to customize the keybindings, but why bother when it changes so quickly.)
The entire idea that “I’m too cool to use an IDE” I find kind of dumb. I was using a Turbo C IDE in college in 1994, Visual Studio until 2019 and since then VSCode.
YUP! This is why I've settled on Aider and it's "IDE integration" (watches all files for comments that end in "AI!", which then invokes the AI). I can then use it with whatever editor I prefer. I view the vscode mono-culture as a bad thing. I also like I can use any AI backend I like, which is really how it should be: Vendor lock-in tools are bad, remember?
I guess you lose tab-completion suggestions, but I am not a fan of those compared to 'normal' tab-complete (if backed by an lang server). If I want AI, I'll write a short comment and invoke the tool explicitly.
EDIT: Of course, it really depends an your usecase. I maintain/upgrade C code libs and utils; I really cannot speak to what works best for your env! Webdev is truly a different world.
EDIT2: Can't leave this alone for some reason, the backend thing is a big deal. Switching between Claude/Gemini/Deekseek and even rando models like Qwen or Kimi is awesome, they can fill in each other's holes or unblock a model which is 'stuck'.
This is why you will have to pry vim and my own brain out of my cold dead hands.
It’s not just the IDE but the ML model you are selling yourself to. I see my colleagues atrophy before me. I see their tools melt in their hands. I am rapidly becoming the only person functionally capable of reason on my own. It’s very very weird.
When the model money dries up what’s going to happen?
I dunno. There's also a good chance that you just end up being left behind like graybeards that only wanted to code in C and assembler.
I too am old enough to have seen a lot of unnecessary tech change cycles, and one thing I've noticed about this industry is no matter how foolish a trend was, we almost never unwind it.
I get paid a fuck load of money to write C. Your point is?
As for trends, I've been around long enough to have seen this cycle a couple of times...
Every 6 months? It's turning into every two weeks. Sticking with claude code. Its working beautifully for us.
I love Claude Code too, and it definitely has it's place. I think that IDE's have a few advantages over CLI tools though. In specific the IDE has a lot more contextual information such as what files you have open, warnings from linters or type checkers, information from LSP, etc.
I think it is entirely possible to build a fantastic CLI tool for coding, and the CLI tools for coding already work well enough, but there is just more context info available inside of an IDE, therefore the ceiling is higher when working with an agent that runs inside of the IDE. Context is king for LLM results, and IDE's just have more context.
Over time I'm sure we'll see tools like Claude Code support everything that an IDE can do, but for now if you want to reach the same ceiling you still have to glue together a very custom setup with MCP tool use, and that has the downside of introducing additional tool use latency, compared to an IDE that is able to source context directly from the IDE's internal API, and provide that to the LLM nearly instantly.
I use claude code in vscode. Cmd-Esc opens a claude code tab. Then /ide conects to the vscode and it's all like cursor at that point.
Same here - in fact, I just recently cancelled my Cursor subscription because Claude Code + VSCode seems just as good. I think Cursor is a decent product and some of the UX it puts around LLM interaction is helpful - but I just can't really justifying paying Cursor to middleman my requests to LLM providers when Claude Pro is $20 / month.
I have a question. I do not like the concept of "agent mode" for AI. I'm a control freak and I want to control every line that gets committed because I am responsible for it and need to understand/visualize/memorize every part of codebases I work on.
Is Claude Code good for the "ask" flow? No, right?
The old flow before agent mode got added. Select some code, ask questions about it or give an instruction on editing it and then choose to accept the change.
As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.
Am I right?
Claude Code is definitely more agentic, but you can use it in a variety of ways. In Plan Mode it won't touch the code, and by default it asks you to accept every single diff. With IDE integration you can definitely just highlight some code and ask questions, I don't see why that workflow wouldn't work.
> As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.
> Am I right?
With cursor you get reasonably flexible control at many levels. You can have it only suggest changes that you have to apply manually or you can have it make automatic changes with various ways to review, change, reject or accept. I usually have the changes made automatically but don’t accept the changes automatically. Cursor has a UI that lets you review each edit individually, for the whole file or all files. Depending on the situation I will use whichever level is appropriate. The UI also allows you to revert changes or you can ask the AI to undo or rework a change that you just approved so there’s plenty of ways to do large changes without giving up control. There’s also a stop button you can use to interrupt mid-stream if the work it’s doing isn’t what you want. It isn’t flawless but I haven’t found myself in a corner where I couldn’t get back to a happy path.
We tend to allow this. But you can review the diff before you allow it. It seems easier to say "roll that back" or hit esc if you see it doing things you dont like and then correcting it. I have to say the velocity is insane of coding this way. We also commit a LOT and explicitly dont allow claude to push code ever. That way we can roll back if needed, but honestly it's pretty rare to need to. The MAX plan is a must to work this way though.
I like aider's solution of encapsulating each edit in a git commit; I hope that gets widely adopted.
Unfortunately aider is showing its age. It is great for what it does, but better LLMs + "agentic" have shown that you can get more in the swe domain.
There was a paper recently where they had an LLM evolve tool harnesses and got ~20% more than w/ aider on the benchmark they used, so it's pretty clear that the models + tools (+better harness) are better than just aider.
1) You can plug in any model into aider 2) It can be quite agentic
> evolve tool harnesses
Claude code & Gemini cli etc. don't do this either
Don't get me wrong, I love aider and I've been using it since the early days. I'm just commenting on the overall "gains" and imo they are higher with the latest tools (claude code, gemini, etc).
As for 1), I agree but you force the model to work within aider's constraints. Claude4 for example excels at the agentic flow and it's better at that than providing the diffs that aider expects.
As for the last sentence, I disagree. They are evolving the stack, and more importantly they are evolving both at the same time, stack + LLM. That's the main reason they all subsidise use atm, they are gathering data to improve both. If I were to place a bet right now, I'd say that provider_tool + provider_LLM > 3rd party tool + same model in the short, medium and long term.
Oh, that's a good point, I misunderstood you to mean: The LLM writes it's own harnesses etc.
Add two lines to CLAUDE.md and claude code can do this as well :)
It could be better. I think the PMs and investors and decision makers at these companies are running with a "we want to replace / automate developers" philosophy, while these tools are actually best at augmenting developers. And so they're sorta builing with this "I'll do everything and ask you for confirmation" (and basically encourage you to give me blanket permission).
In reality these tools would be best if they took a more socratic method, a more interactive pair programming approach. So instead of giving you a blanket diff to accept or refuse or "No, and here's some changes" -- it should be more dialog oriented.
Of all of them so far though, I think Claude Code is closest to this. IF you prompt it right you can have a much more interactive workflow, and I find that most productive.
> As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.
You’re sort of technically correct but I wouldn’t really describe it this way exactly. You have to proactively accept or reject all changes to your files in some way.
It is almost impossible to accidentally commit code you don’t want.
It’s not really an edit in the same sense as an unstated change. It doesn’t even really do that until you accept the result.
It’s basically saving you a UI step compared to ask mode with basically no downside.
All of these agentic IDEs could just be visual studio code plugins. They’re likely not because how do you secure VC funding for a plugin?
They have a CLI similar to Claude Code already: https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli
Totally agreed, which is why I'm sticking with my editor (neovim) regardless of whatever AI thing is hot and using tools outside/analogous to it, currently claude code
The nice thing about CLI/TUI is that you can keep using your editor or IDE of choice and chat with the AI on the side.
people are trying to find a moat that will bind their userbase. Browsers, editors, apps etc. There must be a format that locks users in so they will try them all one after another
> Here my problem with this: I don't want to be jumping an editor/IDE every 6 months, learning new key bindings and even more importantly, getting used to a completely new look.
You're basically advocating for GNU Emacs: https://github.com/karthink/gptel
gptel is great, its one of the must have packages for Emacs and I'm pretty sure that with time it will be one of the reasons to use Emacs like org-mode has been for a long time.
For people wanting to get up and running with vanilla Emacs (instead of a distribution) so that they can try out gptel sometime this week, I recommend emacs-bedrock: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
And for a gptel backend Gemini is the fastest route (excluding something local) from generating an API key to using a LLM in Emacs (for free).
Bonus points because Emacs is useful for things other than coding you can use gptel on your notes or any buffer really to ask/talk about stuff.
Thanks for the link. I'm not an emacs user and I'm more in the search of something like opencode [1], but I think it's not polished enough yet. I actually want to contribute to open source, so maybe I should create my own thing, heh.
[1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode
CLI -> Voice & Gesture UI
> learning new key bindings
Why are they shipping them with different key bindings? Seems like the opposite of what you do to encourage product adoption.
I love all of this experimentation in how to effectively use AIs to co-create output with human steering. This pattern, of the human human focusing on the high-level and the AI focusing on the low level feels like a big win.
In some sense, we are starting with a very high-level and gradually refining the idea to a lower and lower levels of detail. It is structured hierarchical thinking. Right now we are at 3 levels: requirement -> spec -> code. Exposing each of these layers as structured text documents (mostly Markdown right now it seems) is powerful since each level can be independently reviewed. You can review the spec before the code is written, then review the code before it gets checked in.
My intuition is that this pattern will be highly effective for coding. And if we prove that out at scale, we should start asking: how does this pattern translate to other activities? How will this affect law, medicine, insurance, etc. Software is the tip of the iceberg and if this works then there are many possible avenues to expand this approach, and many potential startups to serve a growing market.
The key will be managing all of the documents, the levels of abstraction and the review processes. This is a totally tractable problem.
I got early access to Kiro. Wrote about my experiences here if you're interested: https://yehudacohen.substack.com/p/developing-with-kiro-amaz...
It is my new daily driver.
Caylent has been testing this for quite some time and I have to say it's an interesting take. With claude code you can shift between planning and coding modes and this offers a similar approach. The speed is quite good and the results are solid. The spec approach is solid but it takes a learning curve. Some of the tooling and autojumps take a bit to get used to because they differ from the other IDE approaches.
Overall I do believe this has accelerated our development and I'm interested to see where it goes. I don't think it's a direct comparison to claude code or cursor - its a different approach with some overlap.
Many companies are considering IDEs the way to reach developers. Atom started the trend of next generation IDEs and VSCode consolidated most of the market. With the AI raising, people are looking to get usage, gathering data, and positioning models. An IDE provides you all of that.
AI seems to be a way to engage happy users to try new things. Kiro joins a growing list of projects:
- Kiro (AWS)
- VSCode + Copilot (Microsoft)
- Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)
- Cursor
- Trae (Alibaba)
- Zed
- etc.
I put Zed in a separate category in the past. Now with assistants / agents, it's playing on the same space.
The market is a bit saturated and tools like Claude Code gave some flexibility and an alternative for users. I tried Cursor in the past, and now I'm back to Helix / VSCode + Claude Code.
I love Zed as an editor/IDE without ANY AI/LLM features. I think the AI support in Zed is actually pretty decent and I'm still using it out of habit (actively trying to use more TUI for AI).
But at the same time, it's my biggest worry that they will continue on the AI and pollute the project with too much junk. I gotta trust the smart minds behind it will find a way to balance this trend.
Totally. I think Zed has its own value proposition. That's why I never put them close to other editors like Cursor at the beginning.
Lately, I started putting it together due to all the AI excitement. People try it because of the AI capabilities to find an IDE that works for them.
I hope Zed continues providing new amazing features in all the areas.
> Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)
And Google killed it.
I got to play with this for the past week, and it's surprisingly good from an angle of "does a lot of the context engineering work for you." It enforces a rigor that I don't usually bring to vibe coding...
Thanks so much for your feedback Corey! That's one of the big goals of Kiro: to add a bit more of the rigor required to keep your code projects sane as they grow over time. I think Kiro hits the best of both worlds: the easy fun of "vibe coding" at first but then when its time to do some software engineering, Kiro is there to help dig deep into the technical requirements, write the architectural design, and break the big project up into reasonable tasks.
Can it sort out AWS bills yet?
(I initially started writing this as a joke upon recognizing your name, but now I think I'm serious..)
I’ve yet to see a GenAI system that comes even slightly close. They’re dangerously inaccurate in this space.
That's been my experience as well. Makes sense, there's little training data available and the (public) docs and (first-party) tooling remain dreadful.
For anyone wondering, Amazon already offers an Agentic coding CLI similar to Claude Code: https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli
It has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the subscription is better value than Claude Code, but hard to tell.
It supports MCP as well.
Amazon Q also has a VC Code and IntelliJ Idea plugin too, Kiro goes beyond what you can do as a plugin in VS Code though, similar to why Cursor had to fork VS Code.
Q CLI is great. It’s basically Claude models but pretty much unlimited and only for $20
Not as polished as Claude Code but also a bit price difference
That sounds too good to be true, and it seems like they are indeed introducing a usage system similar to their competitors next month?
> Starting August 1, 2025, we’re introducing a new pricing plan for Amazon Q Developer designed to make things simpler and more valuable for developers.
> Pro Tier: Expanded limits $19/mo. per user
> 1,000 agentic requests per month included (starting 8/1/2025)
- https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing/
Previously agentic use was apparently "free", but with a set deadline in June, so it seems like this was just for a testing phase?
So I am pretty sure that there is some aws/amazon service which can provide gpu's / model inference too.
I read it (I think) in one of the comment that There is a model picker that currently allows you to switch between Claude Sonnet 4.0 and Claude Sonnet 3.7
So is this just using Claude?
I really thought that the advantages of using Kiro might really be that of the leverage that Amazon Gpu's infrastructure could provide, maybe even some discounts to lure people to Kiro.
I am pretty sure that a lot of people will ask you the same question, But I would really appreciate it if you could answer me this question in preferably simple terms: "Why Kiro? Why not all the other stuff that has come before it and the stuff that will come after it"
Also I am really having some dejavu but while writing this comment, has the title of this post changed, I swear I saw something written in the header with Amazon and now I don't see it. honestly, I am really being so off-topic but after seeing this name change of the post, I really wish if that there was some website that could track all the name changes of posts that happen in HN, because I was completely baffled by this name change or I am being totally paranoid.
The previous title stated Kiro as being "Amazon's Cursor clone", which I agree was not adequate.
My suspicions were right that the name had something to do with amazon because I went into this thread thinking about Amazon's unique position in this market.
Unless it offers me something substantially better than VSCode, I am not gonna switch and it has a lot to do with unsupported extensions. For now, I think UX preference has to be CLI with web gui wrapper where you can pick models, agents, requirements, etc and let that run anywhere, even headless. I don’t like how these guys (as in all the VSCode wrappers) are trying to sucker people onto their platform to lock you in.
Edit: I know there’s manual VSIX route.
Kiro is Vscode (forked from the open source version). I imported all the settings and extensions into it from VSCode, worked fine.
what are the unsupported extensions? i thought the support had to do with marketplace access (search / download / update) but if you already have the vsix it can be installed in any vscode fork
Some of Microsoft's extensions are licensed such that they may only be used with their own products (i.e. the official VS Code they offer for download, etc.). This already affects Cursor for example:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dotnettools/issues/1909
This doesn't support development containers (https://containers.dev), which means I can't insulate my machine from AI tooling. Not keen on this unless it's somehow earth-shattering.
why doesn't it support them?
The remote containers extension on VSCode is proprietary. Cursor had to write their remote extension suite.
I've been testing Kiro for a few months, and yes, it's an agentic IDE like many others. However, a lot of the features are different - the spec driven development is a game changer. It feels like you're truly software engineering versus vibing - you break a problem into small, solvable steps using specs. So are agent hooks - there are great use cases like updating Asana statuses or syncing your design system with Figma.
So I'm glad there are more agentic dev tools coming out, but can we please stop making entirely new IDEs and start integrating as plugins to well-established (and some already paid for) IDEs we already use? Webstorm/other Jetbrains, VS Code, etc.
It is a huge hassle to match my existing settings, which I've spent countless hours tweaking over the years, with a new editor that can't import them. :(
The obvious solution is a meta-IDE that integrates all these other IDEs and plugins.[1]
Or, you know, stop chasing the latest trends, and use whatever you're most comfortable with.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/927/
I use Roo code with orchestrator(Boomerang) mode which pretty much has similar workflow. The orchestrator calls the architect to design the specs, and after iterating and agreeing on the approach, it is handed over to Code mode to execute the tasks. Google Gemini 2.5 pro is pretty good at orchestration due to its 1M context and I use claude sonnet 4 for code mode.
What else does Kiro do differently?
Edit: The hooks feature looks nifty. How is the memory management handled? Any codebase indexing etc? Support to add external MCP servers like context7 etc?
Hey, a cute logo! I didn't know AWS allowed cute things.
Title should be: "Introducing Kiro"
I'm already burnt from amazon Q which was forced onto us in an alpha state in my workplace - was miles behind competitors for a full year, before we finally won the battle to move back to co-pilot.
Going to take a while before I trust any AWS AI related tooling won't just be abandoned / mis-managed after my prior experience.
I really like that the testimonials are linked directly to the Github accounts of the contributors. I've seen a lot of websites where it's questionable at best whether the people reviewing the product even exist.
It's also interesting that the pricing is in terms of "interactions" rather than tokens. I don't believe I've seen that before.
I am a heavy Jetbrains user, I never liked the idea of Cursor. I embraced Claude Code immediately when it came out.
Are you using the Claude Code plugin, or switching back and forth between Claude Code and the Jetbrains IDE?
With the plugin. CC runs in a terminal on the sidebar. The plugin does not only provide diff view for CC edits, it also gives CC access to diagnosis and all other IDE capabilities through MCP.
Would appreciate a video of someone adding a feature to an existing project, just to get a feel for what the tool does. The long blog post gets lost in the sauce, would love a short 5 minute video.
How do I know that this is an AWS product? This should be on an Amazon domain or the blog should be on an Amazon domain that links to the site.
Looks very nice, I like the hooks feature. That's a great idea
Is there any way to move the chat window to the primary side bar? Having two side bars open takes up a lot of space. Not sure why this pattern persists in these VScode forks.
Generally in VSCode and its clones you can drag the window anywhere you like. I've been using my Copilot in the lower area which spans multiple panels, to give myself a little more viewing space.
I'm a little confused about how pricing works here. What is an 'agentic interaction' and how does that translate to dollars? And how does this work with models that are differently priced???
What models are supported, can we add custom models? I’m struggling to add Kimi K2 to cursor and surf.
does this have any carveouts for CDK or other aws services? I've found that sonnet sometimes struggles to know what params to use, while amazon Q despite being on paper a worse model, can. It seems this uses sonnet, but are there any adjustments?
Kiro's spec based development is something that's new (for me atleast) and it's pretty good.
I'll stick with my gentic IDE & write my own bugs.
I tried Kiro just to test the tool and I was able to create a small order application. I liked it that that it created the documentation including planning and test scenarios. I will continue using the tool to create more complex apps.
Not amazed! Tell me one good reason I should use it?
Lets see EU US data privacy shield gone. Aws a bunch of open source tools gobbled together with proprietary source. Trust in made in US cloud platform tools is gone!
This is exactly how I've been building software with AI lately. Getting AI to create a detailed plan with phases, then implement and use a separate AI to review the code. It works quite well! Curious to see how well it works when implemented directly in the IDE
At what point does the manager fire you and just let the AIs have at it ;)
Realistically, none of the models can function fully autonomously at this point. You still need a skilled human at the helm. However, AI tools definitely change how the human works. I find that I spend a lot less time thinking about easy things, and a lot more time thinking about hard things.
Basically, the AI fast forwards through the easy stuff and I just spend all day jumping directly from hard problem to hard problem.
No autocomplete? Why? I mean is the current trend to leave all the control from the experienced dev hands and just review the final code? Not my cup of tea, I'll keep using Cursor and "vibe code" with smart rewrites
Kiro does have autocomplete. It's just not advertised on the product page as a star feature.
In my experience using Kiro you are still going to be hands on with the code. Personally I choose to turn AI powered autocomplete off because when I do touch the code manually it's usually for the purposes of working on something tricky that AI would likely not get right in autocomplete either.
However, the Kiro autocomplete is average in capability in my experience, and you can absolutely use it to write code by hand as well.
Big opportunity to be the first open source model agnostic Claude Code with widespread adoption. You’ll be the vim, the Linux, the nginx, the MySQL of agentic coding. Who will it be? It’s wide open right now.
This is much more tricky than you'd think. Claude Code and other similar tools only work as well as they do because the prompts that power it have been tuned to match a specific model.
When you make a tool that is "model agnostic" you also make a tool that is unable to play to the individual strengths of each model, or you set yourself up for a massive, multiplicative effort of trying to tune your tool to every single popular model out there, even though some of the models are drastically less capable than others.
Hopefully better then the hell that is trying to use Amazon Q for development.
Why couldn't this be built inside Q?
From the little I’ve played with it so far, its spec-driven format seems to give better results when making large changes to code.
wait, it's completely free during the preview period? That's a better deal than Cursor, Windsurf, or Claude Code. Gotta check it out
Too late to the party. Feels like the market has moved onto Claude Code and terminal agents. I use Claude Code extensively and love the flexibility and fluidity. Also works well through the terminal integration in IDE.
Why do I need to log in to a text editor?
Why does it feel like all tech companies are the same these days? It wasn’t always like this right?
Because collecting signals from the people that use these systems is extremely valuable. This kind of data is almost impossible to gather unless you own such a product. And those that do probably won't sell to the competition. So, it makes sense that everyone is in the me too phase.
Goog is even heavily subsidising this. Anthropic is likely doing it with their top tiers as well. Even the small ones @20$ most likely did in the beginning.
All the tech companies have a lot of software developers working there and they always have a ton of projects around software development and deployment that they've released. It's been new that they've been _monetizing them_, but that pretty much has to be done for AI tooling because of inferencing costs....
super interesting to see how this is marketed:
- Created by an AWS team but aws logo is barely visible at the bottom.
- Actually cute logo and branding.
- Focuses on the lead devs front and center (which HN loves). Makes it seem less like a corporation and more like 2 devs working on their project / or an actual startup.
- The comment tone of "hey ive been working on this for a year" also makes it seem as if there weren't 10 6-pagers written to make it happen (maybe there weren't?).
- flashy landing page
Props to the team. Wish there were more projects like this to branch out of AWS. E.g. Lightsail should've been launched like this.
What is the difference between kiro and having a rule file in claude code / cursor / cline saying « always start designing before coding. Create a .md file for specs, ask the user for it if it is not there? ». You can just prompt the specs or whatever feature is in this IDE.
Claude 4 can do it all already.
Awesome! Tried it and I should say, adds structure to my vibe coding. Loving it.
Impressive to see an AI IDE tackle the real world complexity of software development. Love the separation of modes- Vibe for ideation, Spec for clarity, and Agent Hooks for ongoing maintenance. The spec-driven approach feels like a natural evolution beyond the typical AI prototype tools. Excited to try it out on a live project!
With my experience with Amazon Q in the AWS console (100% useless, worse than a Google search), I can only assume that this Kiro product will suck and not be a market leader.
As a customer I have no incentive to try it.
I think that reputation is 100% Amazon’s fault. When all you do is ship half-baked rushed products your customers will assume your next big thing sucks because that’s the reputation you built for yourself.
AWS really shot themselves in the foot with naming everything “Amazon Q <insert suffix here>”. The Q that’s in the console is completely and entirely different from the “Q Developer” and other AI products that AWS is launching.
The Q Developer CLI, Q Developer IDE plugins, and now Kiro are pretty much just wrappers around Claude Sonnet 3.7/4, and work just as well as them.
Given the rapidly-changing state of AI, "half-baked" is a moving target. The Q console support was never great, but it's materially worse than it was a year ago, relative to what could be built today.
I would also like to add that forking VScode is not a value add. Just publish a VSCode extension.
Kiro in Finnish means "a curse".
More modern would be Kirous.
Kiro is built for developers who thinks beyond just code snippets. If you care about specs, architecture, and long term maintainability, it’s worth a serious look.
I think this is where the stickiness is with generation; very little chance I’m switching from Claude Code unless something exceptionally better comes along at this point. Assuming I’m not abnormal, this is a huge win for Anthropic.
So we have another ugly VSCode clone with the same legal/support issues as all the other clones, but without any vibe-coding worthy assists like voice dictation/control or any other major differentiator. Just another "me too" project from AWS to scratch some product manager itch and commoditize the complement of some competitor.
Im.not a dev so i dont use these vs code forks...
How is one fork different from cursor or kiro or something else?
Arent these like what i assume skinning chromium or something more ?
I'm surprised no one is gobbling up jetbrains.
They have been cleaning up and getting rid of projects, so seems to be preparing for it.
awesome tool!
Am I the only one who finds AI not very helpful?
Just this morning, Cursor was giving me a ton of incorrect tab completions. When I use prompts, it tends to break more than it fixes. It's still a lot faster to write by hand. Lots of libraries that take *arguments in Python also cannot be groked by AI.
At work it's supremely unhelpful. Giant C++ codebase, big enough to choke even traditional analysis tools like IntelliSense, lots of proprietary libraries.
I have found it extremely useful for spinning up personal projects though.
My wife bought us Claude subscriptions and she's been straight-up vibe coding an educational game for our son with impressive results (she is a UX designer so a lot more attuned to vibes than gen-pop). I'm picking up some computational physics research threads I dropped in grad school and Claude Code has been incredible at everything besides physics and HPC. Define and parse an input file format, integrate I/O libraries, turn my slapdash notes into LaTeX with nice TiKz diagrams, etc.
Hoping I can transfer over some insights to make it more helpful at work.
Of course you aren't the only one, and I'm sure you know that you aren't the only one.
I doubt these tools will ever convince every last person on every single use case, so the existence of those people isn't exactly an indictment.
You have to put in some effort to put in the guardrails and scaffolds to make it produce what you want. It’s definitely not out-of-the-box deal.
loom mom, another vscode fork!
Is this another VS Code fork or did they just completely rip the VS code ui?
Fork and an old one
It's another VS Code fork!
Had they not forked VS Code the low value quips would reverse to: "why didn't you just fork VS Code?"
What's with the edited title "it's Cursor clone".
Unless it's literally a Cursor clone, I'd request to change it to describe the product category.
Cursor by no means defines the whole category. Not even close.
product category: "vscode with ai things slapped on top"
By vscode you mean atom clone with extra tools slapped on top, right?
And with atom you mean Notepad++ with extra tools slapped on top?
To be fair, npp is not using electron. Atom is.
We've replaced the title. (Submitted title was "AWS launches Kiro, its Cursor clone")
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AWSome KIROOOOOO
Amazon ewwwww