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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

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Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#21

Post by bryanlarsen »

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…

They're all based vscode, so the switching costs are fairly minimal? It'll get worse over time as they diverge, but at the moment they're all fairly similar AFAICT. It's starting to become noticeable that Cursor isn't picking up VSCode enhancements and fixes, but it's still quite minor.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#22

Post by MuffinFlavored »

TimMeade wrote: post #18
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…

Every 6 months? It's turning into every two weeks. Sticking with claude code. Its working beautifully for us.

I have a question. I do not like the concept of "agent mode" for AI. I'm a control freak and I want to control every line that gets committed because I am responsible for it and need to understand/visualize/memorize every part of codebases I work on.

Is Claude Code good for the "ask" flow? No, right?

The old flow before agent mode got added. Select some code, ask questions about it or give an instruction on editing it and then choose to accept the change.

As I understand (I could be wrong), with agent mode, it edits the file for you, no way for you to accept before it does, so you have to manually check the diff, roll back parts you don't want, etc.

Am I right?

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#24

Post by NathanKP »

charlysl wrote: post #6
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…

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, and what technical changes need to happen to resolve the difference. Then tasks breaks the very large end to end development flow up into smaller pieces that an LLM can realistically tackle. The agent then keeps track of it's work in the tasks file.

Realistically, I don't think that Harper's statement of "I get to play cookie clicker" is achievable, at least not for nontrivial tasks. Current LLM's still need a skilled human SDE in the loop. But Kiro does help that loop run a lot smoother and on much larger tasks than a traditional AI agent can tackle.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#25

Post by qrush »

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…

Are there plans to let AWS customers hook this up to Bedrock / use models through that?

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#26

Post by suralind »

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

Thanks for the link. I'm not an emacs user and I'm more in the search of something like opencode [1], but I think it's not polished enough yet. I actually want to contribute to open source, so maybe I should create my own thing, heh.

[1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#28

Post by angelmm »

Many companies are considering IDEs the way to reach developers. Atom started the trend of next generation IDEs and VSCode consolidated most of the market. With the AI raising, people are looking to get usage, gathering data, and positioning models. An IDE provides you all of that.

AI seems to be a way to engage happy users to try new things. Kiro joins a growing list of projects:

- Kiro (AWS)

- VSCode + Copilot (Microsoft)

- Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)

- Cursor

- Trae (Alibaba)

- Zed

- etc.

I put Zed in a separate category in the past. Now with assistants / agents, it's playing on the same space.

The market is a bit saturated and tools like Claude Code gave some flexibility and an alternative for users. I tried Cursor in the past, and now I'm back to Helix / VSCode + Claude Code.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#30

Post by bryanlarsen »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #22
TimMeade wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every 6 months? It's turning into every two weeks. Sticking with claude code. Its working beautifully for us.

I have a question. I do not like the concept of "agent mode" for AI. I'm a control freak and I want to control every line that gets committed because I am responsible for it and need to understand/visualize/memorize every part of codebases I work on. Is Claude Code good for the "ask" flow? No, right? The old flow before agent mode got added. Select some code, ask questions about it or give an instruction on editing i…

I like aider's solution of encapsulating each edit in a git commit; I hope that gets widely adopted.
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