Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 498 posts

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#181

Post by aaronvg »

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#182

Post by stillpointlab »

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#183

Post by didibus »

NathanKP wrote: post #179
didibus wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#184

Post by NathanKP »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #151

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 sc…

> 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/

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#185

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

pqdbr wrote: post #177
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #172

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 pro…

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#187

Post by epiccoleman »

NathanKP wrote: 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…

> 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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#188

Post by steve_adams_86 »

NathanKP wrote: post #184
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #151

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 sc…

> 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 valu…

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)

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#189

Post by asib »

NathanKP wrote: 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…

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.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#190

Post by neutronicus »

gsibble wrote: post #56

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.

Post reply on HN