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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

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Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#131

Post by NathanKP »

ActorNightly wrote: post #122
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…

While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for no reason.

A few things:

1) It's normal for Kiro (and almost every AI editor) to use a lot more CPU when you first start it up, because it is indexing your codebase in the background, for faster and more accurate results when you prompt. That indexing should complete at some point

2) On initial setup of Kiro it will import and install your plugins from VS Code. If you have a large number of plugins this continues in the background, and can be quite CPU heavy as it extracts and runs the installs for each plugin. This is a one time performance hit though.

3) If your computer is truly idle, most modern CPU's get throttled back to save power. When the CPU is throttled, even a tiny amount of CPU utilization can show up as a large percentage of the CPU, but that's just because the CPU has been throttled back to a very slow clock speed.

In my setup (minimal plugins, medium sized codebase, computer set to never idle the processor clock) I rarely see Kiro helper go above .4% CPU utilization, so if you are seeing high CPU it is likely for one of the above reasons.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#133

Post by polynomial »

suralind wrote: post #12

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…

> learning new key bindings

Why are they shipping them with different key bindings? Seems like the opposite of what you do to encourage product adoption.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#134

Post by placardloop »

theturtletalks wrote: post #67
guluarte wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only if you use vscode, I think TUIs are a better option since a lot of us use other ides than vscode

Seems like Amazon started making this when Cursor was hot in the market, but now that CLI agents like Claude Code are taking over, Kiro will have an uphill battle. It’s also not free or unlimited (though throttled) like Cursor and Claude Code using max plan.

Which is kind of ironic since the Amazon Q Developer CLI (which is essentially Claude Code with a slightly different wrapper) was released long before Claude Code and seems to mostly be flying under the radar.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#135

Post by NathanKP »

theusus wrote: post #121
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…

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 results. So, for example, you will see Kiro automatically notice and attempt to resolve problems from the "Problems" tab in the IDE. Kiro will look at what files you have open and attempt to use that info to jump to the right context faster.

The way I describe it is that the ceiling for an IDE agent is a lot higher than a CLI agent, just because the IDE agent has more context info to work with. CLI agents are great too, but I think the IDE can go a lot further because it has more tools available, and more info about what you are doing, where you are working, etc

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#136

Post by placardloop »

dangus wrote: post #38

With my experience with Amazon Q in the AWS console (100% useless, worse than a Google search), I can only assume that this Kiro product will suck and not be a market leader. As a customer I have no incentive to try it. I think that reputation is 100% Amazon’s fault. When all you do is ship half-baked rushed products your customers will assume your next big thing sucks because that’s the reputation you built for your…

AWS really shot themselves in the foot with naming everything “Amazon Q ”. The Q that’s in the console is completely and entirely different from the “Q Developer” and other AI products that AWS is launching.

The Q Developer CLI, Q Developer IDE plugins, and now Kiro are pretty much just wrappers around Claude Sonnet 3.7/4, and work just as well as them.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#137

Post by charlysl »

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…

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 how specifications, not prompts or code, are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and why spec-writing is the new superpower.

Drawing from production experience, we demonstrate how rigorous, versioned specifications serve as the source of truth that compiles to documentation, evaluations, model behaviors, and maybe even code.

Just as the US Constitution acts as a versioned spec with judicial review as its grader, AI systems need executable specifications that align both human teams and machine intelligence. We'll look at OpenAI's Model Spec as a real-world example.

https://youtu.be/8rABwKRsec4?si=waiZj9CnqsX9TXrM

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#139

Post by aquariusDue »

znpy wrote: post #17
suralind wrote: post #12

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…

> 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. You're basically advocating for GNU Emacs: https://github.com/karthink/gptel

gptel is great, its one of the must have packages for Emacs and I'm pretty sure that with time it will be one of the reasons to use Emacs like org-mode has been for a long time.

For people wanting to get up and running with vanilla Emacs (instead of a distribution) so that they can try out gptel sometime this week, I recommend emacs-bedrock: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

And for a gptel backend Gemini is the fastest route (excluding something local) from generating an API key to using a LLM in Emacs (for free).

Bonus points because Emacs is useful for things other than coding you can use gptel on your notes or any buffer really to ask/talk about stuff.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#140

Post by NathanKP »

powvans wrote: post #107
NathanKP wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this time Kiro is a standalone product that does not require an AWS account at all. Kiro is powered by Bedrock behind the scenes, but it has a layer of abstraction between Kiro and Bedrock, which includes system prompts and additional functionality. I can definitely take this as a feature request though!

If this integrated with AWS for billing, usage, and IAM purposes it would be a no brainer to have my team trying this out today.

You can do that!

There is an AWS IAM Identity Center option for login as well: https://kiro.dev/docs/reference/auth-methods/#aws-iam-identi...

We really need to add some more step by step docs for setting this up, but it's very similar to the Amazon Q Developer integration with AWS IAM Identity Center if you are familiar with that: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/sec...

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