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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

161–170 of 498 posts

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#161
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!

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why build an editor and not a CLI. VS code is really slow for me and I would have preferred a CLI.

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 result…

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#164
post #5

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 pr…

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/

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#165
post #5

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 pr…

Why build an editor and not a CLI. VS code is really slow for me and I would have preferred a CLI.

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#166

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/T…

They have a CLI similar to Claude Code already: https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

Oh, that's a good point, I misunderstood you to mean: The LLM writes it's own harnesses etc.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#168
post #149

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...

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#169
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.

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