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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

431–440 of 498 posts

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#431
Tried to use this to create a minimal bootloader and kernel that prints hello world in x86

There was never a point in which it successfully did anything.

1. Tried to use macOS’s toolchain (m2 laptop so this is not going to work to build x86 binary)

2. It tried to fix that and failed multiple times.

3. Eventually I gave up on it trying to fix itself and told it to just use a container with Fedora Linux on it to work around the issue.

4. It created Dockefile for Fedora 39 (current is 42)

3. It still fails to recognize that we are on aarch64 and we need x86 so the container it built was not correct anyway lol

I imagine “minimal bootloader + printing hello” is quite represented in the training set as there’s thousands of projects like this on GitHub.

If it cannot deal with basic things like this, I legitimately don’t get all the comments here praising it

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would sure be nice to have some standardized conventions around this. AGENTS.md etc. It seems insane to have to have multiple files/rules for essentially the same goals just for different tools.

How about: Creating a MCP server that all the agents are configured to retrieve the rules from?

Then you have to add a rule to every agent to tell it to use this tool.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#435
post #391

I think the interesting part here is not so much the IDE/coding aspect, but LLM-assisted: * requirements doc * design doc * plan doc These alone make an interesting product. Give me a thing that asks me the right, thought provoking questions (ideally let me answer by just choosing from a list of relevant options) and produces these docs in a structured and highly detailed way, and I’m set. I think the code is just a…

True for greenfield projects, but once a project moves beyond greenfield, the assistant will need to understand the existing codebase in order to plan anything correctly. Once it has functionality to understand a codebase, and understand the requirements, plan, and architecture direction, then it's going to have the most context to make edits, so may as well make it an editor too.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#436

This looks really cool except for having to learn a new syntax (is gherkin that bad?) however, something has been bothering me with all of these Agent AI based workflows. At what point do you actually do engineering? This was a great demo for a project manager. Lead your “team” through feature development. But without proper architecture, development really does become spaghetti. There’s vibe coding - and then there’…

It depends. A lot of projects / features really don't require a ton of engineering thought. Add a new table that has some foreign keys with existing tables, add a new page that lets you modify that table, add a new set of REST CRUD handlers that do some validation and store the data, add a new message queue that does whatever needs to happen when the data gets changed.

If AI can handle things like that, then let AI do it: it's not really engineering work anyway; it's copy-and-paste from a previous design, just change the handler logic and the names of things. If 90% of incoming features are like that, then that gives you a lot more time to work on the 10% that are more complex.

Eventually, you'll end up with spaghetti code no matter how well you plan out the architecture, whether human or AI is doing designs. But it'll move that direction even faster with AI, and eventually AI won't be able to understand it well enough to reliably design things anymore. That's where the real engineering will come in. As the system evolves, how do we re-architect things so that AI (and humans) can understand the patterns again and make future changes more reliably?

Right now, it seems like services go through major refactors/rewrites like that every five years or so. And those rewrites tend to be slow and often unsuccessful: even though the existing system is complex, engineers are used to it and it's easier to add one more bandaid than to wait for the full rewrite. Then such rewrites can get stuck in navel-gazing as there's no "perfect" way to do them, and it's lower effort just to go back to the system you already know.

As AI creates more churn though, the architecture will need to be rethought much more frequently. Additionally there will be more urgency to deliver the cleanup because AI will be completely blocked by the existing spaghetti, which brings all product dev to a halt, and you don't have time for navel-gazing because there's no fallback option.

So I think the engineering work post-AI is really going to be this kind of infrastructural planning and rearchitecting, such that AI can deliver features on top of it without friction. And in a way, as an engineer, that's what I want to be doing anyway. We've always had this ideal of continuous refactoring and continuous improvement, that always gets pushed to the backburner when compared to feature development. "Sure this refactor will help future velocity, but we need to make our quarterly goals!" But now, AI will compress those timelines so that maintaining clean architectures has a direct effect on the deliverables of the current quarter.

I personally think this is great. If, in the future, PMs can launch whole features without engineers writing a line of code, that's awesome. It's our job to maintain a system where such an ideal is possible. Which sounds like the job I wanted when I originally signed up to be an engineer.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having ten "Electron Helper (Plugin)" eat a GB of RAM each on idle is the premier desktop experience nowadays. We can't have native apps any more: we don't know how to build them.

It's not that people don't know how to build a native application, it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard. Trying to add in a web version of the same application is impossible. ActiveX and Java Web Start, etc all tried to do this, and all of them ended up deprecated and out of favor for native web solutions. Java IDEs did a lot of this for many years (Eclipse, In…

>it's rather a native application that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux is still really hard.

Not really. Electron is basically web browser.

The issue is that a cornerstone of modern development is basically "don't rewrite what already has been written", however the problem is that you always get optimization creep because of this - people just build shit on top of other shit continuously and never go back and optimize.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried with a small project, it worked fine, no high CPU usage. However with a large project, it seems that it indexed, then dropped CPU, then I started opening up files and working with them, then the CPU spiked again.

I'll look into this. Kiro is supposed to be doing progressive reindexing. When you make a change it should only have to reindex the files that changed. If you have any logs or other data you are willing to share, to help the team investigate you can use the "report a bug / suggest an idea" link at the bottom, or open an issue at: https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro/issues

I ironically don't have a github account (use my own personal gittea). However I don't think its the indexing. I left Kiro open for a day, and CPU usage is still high.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#440
Is there a way to use your Claude Max plan? I checked my token usage (ccusage) if I wasn't on a plan, and last month it would have been over $2000. This constraint prevents me from realistically considering alternatives to Claude Code.
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