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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

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Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#261

Post by prmph »

People are lapping up vibe coding as a way a way to avoid deep work, and spec-driven development is in opposition to that.

Looking at the brief for this, it likely involves painstaking work to review and refine the specs produced. Not that there is anything wrong with that; as I said before in a comment on another story, coding assistants may reduce quite a bit of drudgery, but to get the best out of them you still need to do lots of work.

The more I use agentic coding tools, the more I come to the realization that speccing is where you add value as an experienced skilled engineer. And I think this bodes well for software engineering, as a bifurcation emerges between the vibe coders (who will probably merge with the mythical end-user programmers) and serious engineers whose are skilled at using LLMs via high quality specs to create software of higher quality and maintainability.

So the vibe coders would probably not take to this tool that much, but that's fine.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#262

Post by PartiallyTyped »

qwertox wrote: post #251

Is this an Amazon product? When I click on "Legal" at the bottom of the page, I'm sent to AWS. The docs state at https://kiro.dev/docs/reference/privacy-and-security/#servic... that "Kiro is an AWS application that works as a standalone agentic IDE." But nowhere on the landing page or other pages it states that this is an Amazon product. What is going on? Edit: I see that @nathanpeck is the "author" and he works for…

I don’t think they are trying to hide that.

From the about page.

> Kiro is built and operated by a small, opinionated team within AWS.

Disclaimer: I work at AWS, different org though.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#263

Post by thekevan »

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…

Will the pricing include consideration for if someone if an Amazon Prime subscriber?

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#264

Post by sandeepkd »

Tried with one of my older projects to test it out. The problem statement was to upgrade the Java spring boot version from 2.7 to latest. I have done it in the past so exactly knew what had to be done there. All the requirement docs, design specs, and tasks look verbose and ok on high level. Interestingly I had some idea where the language in those docs was coming from. 1. It created about 40+ tasks (I have my own curated list of 5 tasks based on past experience)

2. At every task it tried to compile the code but failed for dependency errors

3. It still marked the task being complete and passed the onus of failures on the downstream tasks

4. Kept moving with the tasks where the original error were still not fixed but the tasks were being marked as done

5. After some point of time I got tired to a degree that I stopped reading the exact commands being executed, the fatigue of doing something that you are not involved in is for real 6. I made a naive assumption that I can sandbox it by giving permissions to the project folder only. It executed some CLI commands for java that looked simple enough in the beginning.

7. Turns out my environment variables got messed up and other simple things related to git, gradle stopped working

Ended my experiment, reverted the code changes, fixed my environment

Key takeaways:

1. Its giving a sense of work being executed, the quality and concreteness of work is hard to measure unless you have already done that in past. Its creating classes, tests which are not needed instead of focussing on the actual use case.

2. Sandboxes are MUST, there is a real risk of corruption, environment commands are not just simple file changes which could be easily reverted.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#265

Post by exclipy »

NathanKP wrote: post #24
charlysl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

That's a compelling three file format.

Have you considered a fourth file for Implemented such that Spec = Implemented + Design?

It would serve both as a check that nothing is missing from Design, and can also be an index for where to find things in the code, what architecture / patterns exist that should be reused where possible.

And what about coding standards / style guide? Where does that go?

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#267

Post by hu3 »

sandeepkd wrote: post #264

Tried with one of my older projects to test it out. The problem statement was to upgrade the Java spring boot version from 2.7 to latest. I have done it in the past so exactly knew what had to be done there. All the requirement docs, design specs, and tasks look verbose and ok on high level. Interestingly I had some idea where the language in those docs was coming from. 1. It created about 40+ tasks (I have my own cu…

Interesting. How large is the project?

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#268

Post by haiku2077 »

ryandvm wrote: post #99
crinkly wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

All the people I know in the US with those skills make huge amounts of money- at least, the ones who haven't already retired rich.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#269

Post by prmph »

_pdp_ wrote: post #219

As a side note, Kiro is a diminutive of Kiril (Кирил) in Slavic-speaking countries and in Greek. A quick web search also reveals that it can mean "a curse".

How your comment contributes to the discussion I have no idea, but thanks for this factoid nonetheless.
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