University of Kwazulu-Natal

Introducing Kiro A New Agentic Ide That Works Alongside You From

Bonisiwe Shabane
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introducing kiro a new agentic ide that works alongside you from

A new agentic IDE that works alongside you from prototype to production I’m sure you’ve been there: prompt, prompt, prompt, and you have a working application. It’s fun and feels like magic. But getting it to production requires more. What assumptions did the model make when building it? You guided the agent throughout, but those decisions aren’t documented.

Requirements are fuzzy and you can’t tell if the application meets them. You can’t quickly understand how the system is designed and how that design will affect your environment and performance. Sometimes it’s better to take a step back, think through decisions, and you’ll end up with a better application that you can easily maintain. That’s what Kiro helps you do with spec-driven development. I'm excited to announce Kiro, an AI IDE that helps you deliver from concept to production through a simplified developer experience for working with AI agents. Kiro is great at ‘vibe coding’ but goes way beyond that—Kiro’s strength is getting those prototypes into production systems with features such as specs and hooks.

Kiro specs are artifacts that prove useful anytime you need to think through a feature in-depth, refactor work that needs upfront planning, or when you want to understand the behavior of systems—in short, most... Requirements are usually uncertain when you start building, which is why developers use specs for planning and clarity. Specs can guide AI agents to a better implementation in the same way. Kiro hooks act like an experienced developer catching things you miss or completing boilerplate tasks in the background as you work. These event-driven automations trigger an agent to execute a task in the background when you save, create, delete files, or on a manual trigger. In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, organizations face mounting pressure to modernize their legacy systems while maintaining operational excellence and controlling costs.

Traditional approaches to cloud modernization often require weeks of manual assessment, extensive documentation efforts, and significant development resources—creating bottlenecks that delay time-to-market and increase project costs. However, the emergence of AI-powered development assistants like Kiro from Amazon or Cline, integrated with official Anthropic Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for AWS, represents a paradigm shift that transforms these historically manual, time-intensive... This agentic architecture approach delivers measurable business outcomes while significantly reducing project risk and implementation timelines from weeks to days. Organizations can leverage either Kiro or Cline as their AI-powered development partner: Kiro is AWS’s native AI-powered development environment and IDE that provides intelligent assistance for cloud modernization projects. It offers a comprehensive development experience with integrated access to AWS services, documentation, and real-time AI assistance.

Kiro excels at contextual code analysis, infrastructure code generation, visual project management, and collaborative development workflows. It’s ideal for teams that want a complete IDE experience with deep AWS service integration, MCP server management, and AI-powered development assistance built directly into their development environment. Cline option: For organizations not using Kiro, they can use Cline, which fully supports integrations with AWS MCPs. Cline operates as a VS Code extension that provides an integrated development experience within the IDE. Cline is ideal for teams that require using VS Code. Both assistants integrate with official AWS MCP servers to ensure that all recommendations and generated code follow current AWS best practices and leverage the most appropriate services for specific workload requirements.

Kiro is an agentic IDE and command-line interface that helps you go from prototype to production with spec-driven development, agent hooks,powers, and natural language coding assistance. Build faster with AI-powered features that understand your entire codebase, turn prompts into structured specs, and automate repetitive tasks. Kiro is available as both a desktop application and command-line tool: The standalone desktop application is available for: Command-line interface for integrating Kiro into your development workflows and automation scripts. For detailed information on both interfaces, visit kiro.dev

By Nikhil Swaminathan, Product Lead and Deepak Singh, VP DevEx & AgentsI’m sure you’ve been there: prompt, prompt, prompt, and you have a working application. It’s fun and feels like magic. But getting it to production requires more. What assumptions did the model make when building it? You guided the agent throughout, but those decisions aren’t documented. Requirements are fuzzy and you can’t tell if the application meets them.

You can’t quickly understand how the system is designed and how that design will affect your environment and performance. Sometimes it’s better to take a step back, think through decisions, and you’ll end up with a better application that you can easily maintain. That’s what Kiro helps you do with spec-driven development.I’m excited to announce Kiro, an AI IDE that helps you deliver from concept to production through a simplified developer experience for working with AI agents. Kiro is great at ‘vibe coding’ but goes way beyond that—Kiro’s strength is getting those prototypes into production systems with features such as specs and hooks. Kiro specs are artifacts that prove useful anytime you need to think through a feature in-depth, refactor work that needs upfront planning, or when you want to understand the behavior of systems—in short, most... Requirements are usually uncertain when you start building, which is why developers use specs for planning and clarity.

Specs can guide AI agents to a better implementation in the same way.Kiro hooks act like an experienced developer catching things you miss or completing boilerplate tasks in the background as you work. These event-driven automations trigger an agent to execute a task in the background when you save, create, delete files, or on a manual trigger.Building with Specs and HooksKiro accelerates the spec workflow by making... In our example, we have an e-commerce application for selling crafts to which we want to add a review system for users to leave feedback on crafts. Let’s walk through the three-step process of building with specs.1. From single prompt to requirementsKiro unpacks requirements from a single prompt—type “Add a review system for products” and it generates user stories for viewing, creating, filtering, and rating reviews. Each user story includes EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation acceptance criteria covering edge cases developers typically handle when building from basic user stories.

This makes your prompt assumptions explicit, so you know Kiro is building what you want.2. Technical design based on requirementsKiro then generates a design document by analyzing your codebase and approved spec requirements. It creates data flow diagrams, TypeScript interfaces, database schemas, and API endpoints—like the Review interfaces for our review system. This eliminates the lengthy back-and-forth on requirements clarity that typically slows development.3. Implement tasksKiro generates tasks and sub-tasks, sequences them correctly based on dependencies, and links each to requirements. Each task includes details such as unit tests, integration tests, loading states, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility requirements for implementation.

This lets you check work in steps rather than discovering missing pieces after you think you’re done.The task interface lets you trigger tasks one-by-one with a progress indicator showing execution status. Once complete, you can see the completion status inline and audit the work by viewing code diffs and agent execution history.Kiro’s specs stay synced with your evolving codebase. Developers can author code to update specs or update specs to refresh tasks. This solves the common problem where developers stop updating original artifacts during implementation, causing documentation mismatches that complicate future maintenance.4. Catch issues before they ship with hooksBefore submitting code, most developers run through a mental checklist: Did I break anything? Are tests updated?

Is documentation current? This caution is healthy but can take a lot of manual work to implement.Kiro’s agent hooks act like an experienced developer catching things you miss. Hooks are event-driven automations that execute when you save or create files—it’s like delegating tasks to a collaborator. Set up a hook once, and Kiro handles the rest. Some examples: Hooks enforce consistency across your entire team.

Everyone benefits from the same quality checks, code standards, and security validation fixes. For our review feature, I want to ensure any new React component follows the Single Responsibility Principle so developers don’t create components that do too many things. Kiro takes my prompt, generates an optimized system prompt, and selects the repository folders to monitor. Once this hook is committed to Git, it enforces the coding standard across my entire team—whenever anyone adds a new component, the agent automatically validates it against the guidelines.Everything Else You’d ExpectBeyond specs and... Kiro is built on Code OSS, so you can keep your VS Code settings and Open VSX compatible plugins while working with our IDE. You get the full AI coding experience, plus the fundamentals needed for production.The FutureOur vision is to solve the fundamental challenges that make building software products so difficult—from ensuring design alignment across teams and...

The way humans and machines coordinate to build software is still messy and fragmented, but we’re working to change that. Specs is a major step in that direction. Ready to experience spec-driven development? Kiro is free during preview, with some limits. We’re excited to see you try it out to build real apps and would love to hear from you on our Discord server.To get started, Download Kiro and sign in with one of our... We support Mac, Windows, and Linux, and most popular programming languages.

Our hands-on tutorial walks you through building a complete feature from spec to deployment. Start the tutorial.Let’s connect – tag @kirodotdev on X, LinkedIn, or Instagram, and @kiro.dev on Bluesky, and share what you’ve built using hashtag #builtwithkiro Today we're announcing Kiro, an agentic IDE that enables you do your best work with spec-driven development. Beyond offering agentic chat, Kiro introduces a new way to build with AI using specs and agent hooks. When you open Kiro for the first time, you'll go through a quick setup process: You can start working with Kiro in two ways:

Kiro works with existing projects or new ones created through your usual process (like create-next-app). Steering files are markdown documents that provide context about your project—your architecture, stack, and conventions. To get started: AWS re:Post Knowledge Center Feedback Survey Help us improve the AWS re:Post Knowledge Center by sharing your feedback in a brief survey. Your input can influence how we create and update our content to better support your AWS journey.

How I built a complete AI Compliance Auditor MVP using Kiro's spec-driven development approach Kiro, meaning "crossroads" in Japanese (きろ), perfectly embodies the intersection where traditional development meets AI powered acceleration. Thanks to the AWS Community Builders Program, I was able to try out Kiro's features over the last few weeks, and what I discovered fundamentally changed how I approach software development. Important Note: Kiro, launched today in public preview, is not an AWS service or an "AWS Kiro" - it's an agentic IDE that stands on Code OSS platform with the product brand "Kiro". It's unlike any other Amazon product launch. While my examples showcase AWS integrations, Kiro works agnostically with any technology stack and any cloud provider.

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