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.
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....
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
I love this approach using specs and steering. Just curious how it would work in a huge monorepo with many apps and packages in one physical repo. Several hundred devs work with that repo.
Is it possible to have two layers of steering, which is monorepo specific and then app specific? And also regarding specs, would the different apps and teams interfere with each other?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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.
138 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] thread(I initially started writing this as a joke upon recognizing your name, but now I think I'm serious..)
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.
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
I love this approach using specs and steering. Just curious how it would work in a huge monorepo with many apps and packages in one physical repo. Several hundred devs work with that repo.
Is it possible to have two layers of steering, which is monorepo specific and then app specific? And also regarding specs, would the different apps and teams interfere with each other?
Best, Icereed
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is one fork different from cursor or kiro or something else?
Arent these like what i assume skinning chromium or something more ?
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.
It's also interesting that the pricing is in terms of "interactions" rather than tokens. I don't believe I've seen that before.