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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

kiro.dev

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Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#311

Post by NathanKP »

apwell23 wrote: post #302
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…

> almost 95% AI coded I think its because you didn't have hard expectations for the output. You were ok with anything that kind of looked ok.

False. In order to maintain high quality I often rejected the first result and regenerated the code with a more precise prompt, rather than taking the first result. I also regularly used "refactor prompts" to ask Kiro to change the code to match my high expectations.

Just because you use AI does not mean that you need to be careless about quality, nor is AI an excuse to turn off your brain and just hit accept on the first result.

There is still a skill and craft to coding with AI, it's just that you will find yourself discarding, regenerating, and rebuilding things much faster than you did before.

In this project I deliberately avoided manual typing as much as possible, and instead found ways to prompt Kiro to get the results I wanted, and that's why 95% of it has been written by Kiro, rather than by hand. In the process, I got better at prompting, faster at it, and reached a much higher success rate at approving the initial pass. Early on I often regenerated a segment of code with more precise instructions three or four times, but this was also early in Kiro's development, with a dumber model, and with myself having less prompting skill.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#312

Post by m0llusk »

srhngpr wrote: post #259
consumer451 wrote: post #209

Important 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…

To opt out of sharing your telemetry data in Kiro, use this procedure: 1. Open Settings in Kiro. 2. Switch to the User sub-tab. 3. Choose Application, and from the drop-down choose Telemetry and Content. 4. In the Telemetry and Content drop-down field, select Disabled to disable all product telemetry and user data collection. source: https://kiro.dev/docs/reference/privacy-and-security/#opt-ou...

Is there a way to confirm this works or do we just have to trust that settings will be honored?

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#313

Post by apwell23 »

NathanKP wrote: post #311
apwell23 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost 95% AI coded I think its because you didn't have hard expectations for the output. You were ok with anything that kind of looked ok.

False. In order to maintain high quality I often rejected the first result and regenerated the code with a more precise prompt, rather than taking the first result. I also regularly used "refactor prompts" to ask Kiro to change the code to match my high expectations. Just because you use AI does not mean that you need to be careless about quality, nor is AI an excuse to turn off your brain and just hit accept on the…

> precise prompt

If there was such a thing you would just check in your prompts into your repo and CI would build your final application from prompts and deploy it.

So it follows that if you are accepting 95% of what random output is being given to you. you are either doing something really mundane and straightforward or you don't care much about the shape of the output ( not to be confused with quality) .

Like in this case you were also the Product Owner who had the final say about what's acceptable.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#314

Post by consumer451 »

m0llusk wrote: post #312
srhngpr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To opt out of sharing your telemetry data in Kiro, use this procedure: 1. Open Settings in Kiro. 2. Switch to the User sub-tab. 3. Choose Application, and from the drop-down choose Telemetry and Content. 4. In the Telemetry and Content drop-down field, select Disabled to disable all product telemetry and user data collection. source: https://kiro.dev/docs/reference/privacy-and-security/#opt-ou...

Is there a way to confirm this works or do we just have to trust that settings will be honored?

You could place some unique strings in your code, and test it to see if they appear as completions in future foundation models? Maybe?

I am nowhere near being a lawyer, but I believe the promise would be more legally binding, and more likely to be adhered to, if money was exchanged. Maybe?

The "Amazon Q Developer Pro" sub they mention appears to be very inexpensive. https://aws.amazon.com/q/pricing/

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#315

Post by dgfitz »

rcleveng wrote: post #246
slacktivism123 wrote: post #128

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 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.

Qt is pretty good at this actually. I don’t have a Mac, but building the same codebase for windows, linux, and a wasm target was pretty neat the first time I did it.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#316

Post by tuananh »

robbomacrae wrote: post #213
NathanKP wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kiro is created by an AWS team, and originates from AWS expertise. We are using Kiro internally as one of our recommended tools for development within AWS (and Amazon). So Kiro is an official AWS product, however, we are also keeping it slightly separated from the rest of core AWS. For example, you can use Kiro without having any AWS account at all. Kiro has social login through Google and GitHub. Basically, Kiro is…

This is a really interesting setup. If it's not too forward to ask, how is the team structured in terms of incentives? Is Kiro fully within the AMZN comp / RSUs structure, or does it operate more like a spinout with potential for more direct upside? I’m always curious how teams balance the tradeoff between the support of a big org vs having more control over your fate by going fully independent.

this kinda speak about how anti-DX AWS is

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#318

Post by apwell23 »

postalcoder wrote: post #41
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…

I don't know if this is feedback for Kiro per se or more feedback for this category of applications as a whole, but I've personally noticed that the biggest barrier holding me back from giving an earnest look at new coding agents are the custom rules I've set up w/ my existing agents. I have extensively used Copilot, Continue, Cursor, Cline, Aider, Roo Code, and Claude Code. I've just finished porting my rules over t…

> have an llm agent transform them into a format that works better for the agent.

you can do this today though.

Re: Kiro: A new agentic IDE

#320

Post by janstice »

lukev wrote: post #275
consumer451 wrote: post #209

Important 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…

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…

I suspect the product telemetry would be more useful - things like success of interaction vs requiring subsequent editing, success from tool use, success from context & prompt tuning parameters would be for valuable to the product than just feeding more bits into the core model.
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