They did not even spend time to put up a credible demo. The web app they demo has missing images, images that do not correspond to the text. Why would I or anyone else be convinced to spend much more time learning a new IDE and switching to it, when they did not spend enough time for a proper demo.
Kiro: A new agentic IDE
371–380 of 498 posts
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#372Hello 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 it required forking vscode? what prevents this from being just extension? from article I do not see any obvious functionality that would prevent such implementation
Maybe the fact that MSFT has been break extensions for fork is enough?
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#373Is 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…
How are they hiding it?
Click about, says its made by a team within AWS.
Click on any of the legal links in footer, get sent to AWS
Look at the footer, has AWS logo
Look at the license, clearly says "Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates"
On the download page "By downloading and using Kiro, you agree to the AWS Customer Agreement"
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#374Important details from the FAQ, emphasis mine: > For users who access Kiro with Pro or Pro+ tiers once they are available, your content is not used to train any underlying foundation models (FMs). AWS might collect and use client-side telemetry and usage metrics for service improvement purposes. You can opt out of this data collection by adjusting your settings in the IDE. For the Kiro Free tier and during preview, y…
> your content is not used to train any underlying foundation models (FMs). This implies your "content" may be used for anything else, including training non-foundation LLMs. Frankly, even if their disclaimer were broader, I'd still probably not trust them.
As you shouldn't! Only a rube trusts a rule for which there is no real enforcement or punishment is a mere fine. If the erosion of consumer privacy has not taught us that simply stating "we won't use/sell your data" is the biggest lie of the 21st century, then I don't know what will.
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thank you, I will certainly check this out because this is something I've been sort of doing, manually, but I am still struggling to get the right workflow. This recent OpenAI presentation might resonate too then: Prompt Engineering is dead (everything is a spec) In an era where AI transforms software development, the most valuable skill isn't writing code - it's communicating intent with precision. This talk reveals…
You know what an executable spec is? Source code.
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
This brings up a tangential question for me. Clearly, companies view the context fed to these tools as valuable. And it certainly has value in the abstract, as information about how they're being used or could be improved. But is it really useful as training data? Sure, some new codebases might be fed in... but after that, the way context works and the way people are "vibe coding", 95% of the novelty being input is j…
The human/computer interaction is probably more valuable than any code they could slurp up. Its basically CCTV of people using your product and live-correcting it, in a format you can feed back into the thing to tell it to improve. Maybe one day they will even learn to stop disabling tests to get them to pass.
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Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#377Source code analysis [and dump] of Kiro at https://ghuntley.com/amazon-kiro-source-code/ - Uses ripgrep under the hood - VSCode fork (thus suffers from the https://ghuntley.com/fracture problem) - There are 14 different ways defined to edit a file due to its multi-modal design. Tuning this is going to be a constant source of headaches for the team. - Kiro utilises a https://ghuntley.com/specs based workflow.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I appreciate this!
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#378Here 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…
What I like about OpenAI's codex is that it's not an IDE but a web based product that does things asynchronously from your normal workflow. It creates branches and pull requests. And you can iterate with it via git instead of working in the same tool.
So, I can use the tools I use anyway and have AIs adapt to me instead of me having to adapt to new AI powered tools. I'm using a proper IDE (intellij). Me switching to cursor, kiro, or whatever would be an enormously massive downgrade for me. These tools don't come close to the utility and features of what I am used to and depend on. And those new AI tools trying to catch up with Intellij is not their focus or roadmap. I'm not going to wait for that to happen. I need stuff that works now. Not some years after they figure it out. And that includes AI features.
There's a difference between vibe coding where you are sitting on your hands and admiring all the crazy clever stuff the AI does for you that you wouldn't be able to do yourself and working on a system that you've spent years building from scratch with AI to assist you. I do the latter. I'm constantly intervening, dismissing poor results from AI, getting frustrated with LLMs misunderstanding things, ignoring my directions, not getting the full context, etc. But I'm also getting a lot of value out of AIS with dealing with tedious/repetitive stuff, figuring out weird bugs, pointing out my mistakes, or generating perfectly usable solutions for TODOs and FIXMEs I leave in my code. About 50-60% of the PRs codex creates for me are pretty usable.
I use ChatGPT for the small stuff (it can look at intellij and apply diffs) and codex for the bigger stuff "implement foo, add some tests, and tell me when I can look at the PR". And maybe I'll check out the branch and fix a few things myself. That's something my IDE supports very well. It's not a big deal. It doesn't need to be fixed.
I find that increasingly, model quality is not the main blocker for this stuff but the developer/user experience is. Claude might be better. But chat gpt has the far better UX. And I don't even use o3 most of the time. I prefer the more rapid responses other faster models give me. It's not a cost thing but a speed thing. I only escalate to slower models when I don't like the response I'm getting. Codex is nice but slooooooow. But at least I can work on other stuff while it is doing its thing. ChatGPT gives me instant gratification. Select line, Option+shift+1, "Fix this", "....", "apply fix". That's so nice and I do that a lot. And I didn't have to replace my tools. In the same way, Claude code might be marginally better at some stuff. But the Codex developer experience is superior.
So, Kiro sounds like a nice tool for people who don't need or use IDEs. But it's not for me.
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats the convention I am using. My CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md both just say "See AGENTS.md".
Have you heard about symlinks yet? The idea of having a bunch of A100 GPU cycles needed to process the natural language equivalent of a file pointer makes me deeply sad about the current state of software development.
Are you implying frontier models are running on a100s? Certainly not
Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE
#3801000 interactions ($20/month) will run out in a 1-2 hours. Do the math for 3000 interactions.
Kiro has the same problem as many LLM coding tools has: it's not economically sustainable for the company producing the tool (bubble will burst at some point), or it's not worth it for the developer.