[HN Gopher] Kiro: A new agentic IDE
___________________________________________________________________
Kiro: A new agentic IDE
Author : QuinnyPig
Score : 991 points
Date : 2025-07-14 14:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kiro.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (kiro.dev)
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| I got to play with this for the past week, and it's surprisingly
| good from an angle of "does a lot of the context engineering work
| for you." It enforces a rigor that I don't usually bring to vibe
| coding...
| NathanKP wrote:
| Thanks so much for your feedback Corey! That's one of the big
| goals of Kiro: to add a bit more of the rigor required to keep
| your code projects sane as they grow over time. I think Kiro
| hits the best of both worlds: the easy fun of "vibe coding" at
| first but then when its time to do some software engineering,
| Kiro is there to help dig deep into the technical requirements,
| write the architectural design, and break the big project up
| into reasonable tasks.
| mh- wrote:
| Can it sort out AWS bills yet?
|
| _(I initially started writing this as a joke upon recognizing
| your name, but now I think I 'm serious..)_
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| I've yet to see a GenAI system that comes even slightly
| close. They're dangerously inaccurate in this space.
| mh- wrote:
| That's been my experience as well. Makes sense, there's
| little training data available and the (public) docs and
| (first-party) tooling remain dreadful.
| laurent_du wrote:
| You probably need an ad hoc MCP for this kind of things.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| You need far more than that. Beyond the basic resource
| sizing / misconfiguration issues, it's highly
| contextually dependent to an environment / institution. A
| change that's great for one customer could be ruinous for
| another.
| techpineapple wrote:
| Why does it feel like all tech companies are the same these days?
| It wasn't always like this right?
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Because collecting signals from the people that use these
| systems is extremely valuable. This kind of data is almost
| impossible to gather unless you own such a product. And those
| that do probably won't sell to the competition. So, it makes
| sense that everyone is in the me too phase.
|
| Goog is even heavily subsidising this. Anthropic is likely
| doing it with their top tiers as well. Even the small ones @20$
| most likely did in the beginning.
| empath75 wrote:
| All the tech companies have a lot of software developers
| working there and they always have a ton of projects around
| software development and deployment that they've released. It's
| been new that they've been _monetizing them_, but that pretty
| much has to be done for AI tooling because of inferencing
| costs....
| AstroBen wrote:
| It's a new category of tool and they're all competing for it
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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 projects. Kiro
| can take your basic "vibe coding" prompt, and expand it into deep
| technical requirements, a design document (with diagrams), and a
| task list to break down large projects into smaller, more
| realistic chunks of work.
|
| I've had a ton of fun not just working on Kiro, but also coding
| with Kiro. I've also published a sample project I built while
| working on Kiro. It's a fairly extensive codebase for an infinite
| crafting game, almost 95% AI coded, thanks to the power of Kiro:
| https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro
| charlysl wrote:
| Is it something similar to Harper Reed's "My LLM codegen
| workflow atm"?
|
| https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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.
| charlysl wrote:
| 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
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| You know what an executable spec is? Source code.
| exclipy wrote:
| That's a compelling three file format.
|
| Have you considered a fourth file for Implemented such that
| Spec = Implemented + Design?
|
| It would serve both as a check that nothing is missing from
| Design, and can also be an index for where to find things
| in the code, what architecture / patterns exist that should
| be reused where possible.
|
| And what about coding standards / style guide? Where does
| that go?
| NathanKP wrote:
| That is interesting. So far we are just using the task
| list to keep track of the list of implemented tasks. In
| the long run I expect there will be an even more rigorous
| mapping between the actual requirements and the specific
| lines of code that implement the requirements. So there
| might be a fourth file one day!
|
| Coding standards / style guide are both part of the
| "steering" files: https://kiro.dev/docs/steering/index
| htrp wrote:
| Is this being powered by any specific model?
|
| >overage charges for agentic interactions will be $0.04 per
| interaction, and if enabled, will begin consuming overages once
| your included amounts are used (1,000 interactions for Pro
| tier, 3,000 for Pro+ tier). Limits are applied at the user
| level. For example, if you are a Pro tier customer who uses
| 1,200 requests, your bill would show an overage charge of $8
| (200 x $0.04). Overages for agentic interactions must be
| enabled prior to use.
|
| What is defined as an interaction?
|
| EDIT: RTFM
|
| >Whenever you ask Kiro something, it consumes an agentic
| interaction. This includes chat, a single spec execution,
| and/or every time an agent hook executes. However, the work
| Kiro does to complete your request--such as calling other
| tools, or taking multiple attempts--does not count towards your
| interactions.
| NathanKP wrote:
| There is a model picker that currently allows you to switch
| between Claude Sonnet 4.0 and Claude Sonnet 3.7
|
| And yes, Kiro is agentic, so it can (and often does) execute
| a long running multi-turn workflow in response to your
| interactions, however, the billing model is based on your
| manual interaction that kicks off the workflow (via chat,
| spec, or hook), even if that agent workflow takes many turns
| for Kiro to complete
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yes the classic Cline setup, you can choose any model as
| long as it's Claude. Anthropic has to be really making API
| bank these days.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Nicely done. I particularly like the emphasis on writing specs
| which really is something new in the space and makes Kirk not
| just "Cursor clone". This is something missing in Claude
| Code... the user needs to remember to ask Claude to update the
| specs.
|
| How does Kirk deal with changes to the requirements? Are all
| the specs updated?
| NathanKP wrote:
| Currently specifications are mostly static documents. While
| they can be refreshed this is a more manual process, and if
| you do "vibe coding" via Kiro it can make code changes
| without updating the specs at all.
|
| I find the best way to use specs is to progressively commit
| them into the repo as an append only "history" showing the
| gradual change of the project over time. You can use Kiro to
| modify an existing spec and update it to match the new
| intended state of the project, but this somehow feels a bit
| less valuable compared to having a historical record of all
| the design choices that led from where you started to where
| you now are.
|
| I think in the long run Kiro will be able to serve both types
| of use: keeping a single authoritative library of specs for
| each feature, and keeping a historical record of mutations
| over time.
| darkwater wrote:
| Hello! What is the connection with AWS? Do you work for AWS? Is
| this going to be some official AWS product, backed by Amazon Q
| or Bedrock?
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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 backed by AWS, but is it's own standalone
| product, and we hope to see it grow and appeal to a broader
| audience than just AWS customers.
| cl0wnshoes wrote:
| Seems like social login isn't working for me on OSX. Just
| downloaded Kiro, clicked the Google option, allowed the
| app, and then get redirected back to
| http://localhost:3128/oauth/callback with an error "Error:
| AuthSSOServer: missing state".
| NathanKP wrote:
| Thanks for the report! I'll keep an eye on it. So far we
| aren't seeing any other reported issues, so it's possible
| that a browser extension, or something else in your setup
| is messing with the SSO flow.
|
| Redirect back to localhost:3128 is normal, that's where
| Kiro is watching for a callback, but the missing state is
| not normal. Something may have stripped the info out of
| the callback before it occurred, which is why I suspect
| an extension in your browser.
|
| Will keep an eye on this though!
| cl0wnshoes wrote:
| FWIW Github login worked, only extensions I run is a
| password manager and Kagi.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Thanks for the additional info!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| After you said that google login didn't work, since I had
| also used github login, I wanted to tell that github
| login had worked for me, but you beat me to it!
|
| I think Auth can be a bit of mess, but yes Its still
| absolutely great that I can just login with github and it
| just works, I am trying out Kiro right as we speak!
| homami wrote:
| It is also not working for me, this opens
| http://localhost:3128/oauth/callback?code=... but on Kiro
| interface I see "There was an error signing you in.
| Please try again"
| DividableMiddle wrote:
| Same error as the others. Looks like auth is successful
| in popup window: "You can close this window".
|
| Then in Kiro I see "There was an error signing you in.
| Please try again.".
|
| FWIW, I've tried GitHub & Google, in different browsers,
| on different networks.
| DividableMiddle wrote:
| For me, it was Little Snitch blocking the request..
| totality wrote:
| Can you please report an issue on our GitHub Issue
| tracker: https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro/issues?
|
| Or can you join the Discord and message me directly
| @swaminator
| robbomacrae wrote:
| 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.
| tuananh wrote:
| this kinda speak about how anti-DX AWS is
| qrush wrote:
| Are there plans to let AWS customers hook this up to Bedrock /
| use models through that?
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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!
| powvans wrote:
| 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.
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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...
| powvans wrote:
| Nice, I'll have to put my (employer's) money where my
| mouth is and try it out tomorrow. Thanks!
| postalcoder wrote:
| 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 to Claude
| Code and this is something I do not want to do again [even if
| it's as simple as dragging and dropping files].
|
| Companies would benefit a lot by creating better onboarding
| flows that migrate users from other applications. It should
| either bring in the rules 1:1 or have an llm agent transform
| them into a format that works better for the agent.
| namanyayg wrote:
| in the early days of building something like that, would love
| to talk for 10 minutes and get your advice if you have the
| time? I couldn't find your email but mine is in my profile.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Or a proper standard like MCP was for agentic tool use, this
| time for context setup...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Problems w auth / security in MCP skeeve me out. For that
| reason, I really don't want to invest in workflows that
| depend on MCP and have steered clear. But I'd be grateful
| for well-informed comments / advice on that front.
|
| As for a hypothetical new "context setup" protocol like you
| posit, I suspect it'd benefit from the "cognitive tools"
| ideas in this awesome paper / project:
| <https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering>
|
| ^ inspiring stuff
| NathanKP wrote:
| You will be happy to find out that Kiro is quite good at
| this! One of my favorite features is "Steering Rules". Kiro
| can help you write steering rules for your projects, and the
| steering rules that it auto generates are actually super
| great for large projects. You can see some examples of auto
| generated steering files here in one of my open source
| projects: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-
| kiro/tree/main/.kiro...
|
| Also these steering rules are just markdown files, so you can
| just drop your other rules files from other tools into the
| `.kiro/steering` directory, and they work as is.
| adastra22 wrote:
| "I really don't want to do X"
|
| "Kirk is actually quite good at this: you just have to do
| X"
|
| "..."
| NathanKP wrote:
| At the prompt: "I have extensively used Copilot,
| Continue, Cursor, Cline, Aider, Roo Code, and Claude
| Code. I do not want to move my files over again for Kiro
| [even if it's as simple as dragging and dropping files].
| Do it for me"
|
| Kiro will do it for you automatically.
| adastra22 wrote:
| And then you have two separate specifications of your
| intent, with the ongoing problems that causes. It's not
| the same thing.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Yeah it would be nice if there was one way to specify the
| rules and intent, but you know how these things go:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
|
| In all seriousness, I'm sure this will become more
| standardized over time, in the same way that MCP has
| standardized tool use.
|
| I've long been interested in something that can gather
| lightweight rules files from all your subdirectories as
| well, like a grandparent rule file that inherits and
| absorbs the rules of children modules that you have
| imported. Something kind of like this:
| https://github.com/ash-project/usage_rules
|
| I think over time there will be more and more sources and
| entities that desire to preemptively provide some
| lightweight instructive steering content to guide their
| own use. But in the meantime we just have to deal with
| the standard proliferation until someone creates
| something amazing enough to suck everyone else in.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| Porting rules is one of the responsibilities of keeping
| them.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I just have a "neutral" guidance markdown setup written in a
| repo.
|
| Then I add it as a git submodule to my projects and tell
| whatever agents to look at @llm-shared/ and update its own
| rule file(s) accordingly
| touristtam wrote:
| I don't add them as submodule but just symlink and ignore
| them globally so they never find their way into codebase; I
| have colleagues that frown upon using LLMs, and. I am not
| going to start a war over their preferences.
| re5i5tor wrote:
| Not Kiro related, but do your Claude Code version of rules
| end up as CLAUDE.md files in various locations?
| sys13 wrote:
| Agents.md is at least used by both codex and GitHub copilot.
| VSCode has its own thing for instruction files and Claude.md
| is also its own thing :(
| nsonha wrote:
| and opencode
| efitz wrote:
| and cline (.clinerules)
| nsonha wrote:
| I mean opencode reads AGENTS.md
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| My Claude.md is a symlink to agents.md.
| esafak wrote:
| There should be a standard rule format in a standard place,
| like ~/.config/llms/rules.md
| brulard wrote:
| this. We need a common file for all these tools. It's not
| like they can not read the format of each other.
| brulard wrote:
| This comment gets downvoted a lot and I can not figure
| why. Is the idea that agentic AI solutions could use
| single common file for the directions misguided or did I
| put the message together wrong?
| kaptainscarlet wrote:
| .vibecodingrc sounds better?
| yodon wrote:
| > There should be a standard rule format
|
| We are a few months into widespread use of this class of
| technology. Now is a terrible time to introduce standards.
| Would be a small short term gain delivering huge long term
| pain.
| newman314 wrote:
| 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.
| tln wrote:
| Thats the convention I am using.
|
| My CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md both just say "See AGENTS.md".
| mkw5053 wrote:
| Same
| Zopieux wrote:
| 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.
| smus wrote:
| Are you implying frontier models are running on a100s?
| Certainly not
| mdaniel wrote:
| This take reminds me of the pain I experience when I
| watch people type website addresses into the google
| search box
| seunosewa wrote:
| How about:
|
| Creating a MCP server that all the agents are configured to
| retrieve the rules from?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Then you have to add a rule to every agent to tell it to
| use this tool.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| symlinks
| apwell23 wrote:
| > have an llm agent transform them into a format that works
| better for the agent.
|
| you can do this today though.
| efitz wrote:
| AFAICT there is no "format" to agent rule files; it's just
| text describing how you'd like the LLM to behave. Typically
| I've seen bullet lists.
|
| Some agents have multiple prompts that are used for
| different modes; I've typically seen this stored as JSON
| that is agent specific and wouldn't necessarily apply to
| different agents.
|
| The only agent specific thing I've ever included in a
| context file is referring to a specific tool. I probably
| could have abstracted that by describing it as "the tool
| that does X" or by just telling it to do the function that
| the tool does.
| spgingras wrote:
| Can you comment on how the IDE performs on large codebases?
| Does the spec based approach help with it? Any examples you can
| give from experience at Amazon?
| NathanKP wrote:
| It works great in really large codebases!
|
| I've published a sample project that is medium sized, about
| 20k lines encompassing a game client, game server, and
| background service: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-
| kiro This has been all developed by Kiro. The way Kiro is
| able to work in these larger projects is thanks to steering
| files like these:
|
| - Structure, helps Kiro navigate the large project:
| https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-
| kiro/blob/main/.kiro...
|
| - Tech, helps Kiro stay consistent with the tech it uses in a
| large project: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-
| kiro/blob/main/.kiro...
|
| And yes, the specs do help a lot. They help Kiro spend more
| time gathering context before getting to work, which helps
| the new features integrate into the existing codebase better,
| with less duplication, and more accuracy.
| svieira wrote:
| Is this supposed to be a demo of how wide-ranging Kiro is or
| how _accurate_ it is? Because the very first item in the
| screenshots is in a superposition of conflicting states from
| various parts of its description.
|
| That said, thanks for being willing to demo what kinds of
| things it can do!
| theusus wrote:
| Why build an editor and not a CLI. VS code is really slow for
| me and I would have preferred a CLI.
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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
| didibus wrote:
| That's all old news. Claude Code and even Amazon Q CLI can
| leverage all this context through MCP as well, with
| connecting to LSP servers, computing repo-maps or code
| indexes, integrating with linters, etc.
|
| In my opinion, CLIs have a higher ceiling, and then they
| are easy to integrate into CI/CD, run them in parallel,
| etc.
| NathanKP wrote:
| MCP is great, but it adds a lot of extra latency. The MCP
| servers themselves will stuff your context full of tool
| details, taking up valuable tokens that could be spent on
| code context. Then at runtime the LLM has to decide to
| call a tool, the tool call has to come back to your
| machine, the data is gathered and sent back to the LLM,
| then the LLM can act on that data. Multiply this by
| however many rounds of tool use the LLM decides it needs
| prior to taking action. If you are lucky the LLM will do
| a single round of parallel tool use, but not always.
|
| The advantage of something more purpose built for
| gathering context from the IDE is that you can skip a lot
| of roundtrips. Knowing the user's intent upfront, the IDE
| can gather all the necessary context data preemptively,
| filter it down to a token efficient representation of
| just the relevant stuff, add it in the context
| preemptively along with the user's prompt, and there is a
| single trip to the LLM before the LLM gets to work.
|
| But yeah I agree with your point about CLI capabilities
| for running in parallel, integrating in other places.
| There is totally room for both, I just think that when it
| comes to authoring code in the flow, the IDE approach
| feels a bit smoother to me.
| didibus wrote:
| I feel what you say is true only for auto-complete, which
| is no longer the ideal workflow for agentic coding.
| Otherwise the IDE doesn't know what it should include or
| not in the context, and you need an AI model to determine
| that.
|
| What people do to avoid what you discussed, is multi-
| agents. The main agent can build up context, plan, than
| delegate execution to other agents, etc.
|
| In my opinion, the benefit of the IDE is really just in
| the possibility of an improved UI/UX over a TUI.
| nwienert wrote:
| It's so much easier for me to prompt by:
|
| - cmd-t fuzzy finding files of cmd-p finding symbols to
| open the various files that are relevant
|
| - selecting a few lines in each file using fast IDE
| shortcuts to move and add
|
| - drag and drop an image or other json files into prompt
|
| - not leave the editor im already working on
|
| Not to mention:
|
| - viewing the agents edits as a diff in the editor and
| all the benefits of easily switching between tabs and one
| click rejecting parts etc
|
| - seeing the sidebar of the agents thoughts and progress
| async alongside the code as I keep looking at things
|
| - pausing the agent and reversing back steps visually
| with the sidebar
|
| - not having to reconfig or setup my entire dev
| environment for some CLI - for example the biome v2 lsp
| just works since it's already working in code which has
| the best support for these things
|
| And really the list of reasons an editor is far better
| just never ends. Claude is ok, but I'm way way faster
| with Cursor when I do need AI.
| didibus wrote:
| To each their own, and I absolutely agree with the prior
| poster about both existing making a lot of sense. It
| comes down to personal preference. I just wanted to point
| out the CLI has no less support for feature and context,
| just a different UX to them.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| The next level of features I want from Claude Code is
| LSPs built right into it, rather that something I have to
| configure with some random MCP server I download from
| some random place.
| blibble wrote:
| > For example, the reason why IDE's feel "slow" is often
| because they just come with more features:
|
| IDEs don't feel slow, they ARE slow
|
| because written in HTML and Javascript
|
| go and try Delphi from 2005, it's blazing fast (and more
| functional...)
| usef- wrote:
| I'm surprised none of them have built on Zed yet
| WD-42 wrote:
| Rust is too hard when you can quickly fork vscode and
| hack together enough JavaScript to hopefully get acquired
| before the moat evaporates.
| iamsaitam wrote:
| Confidently wrong are we? I use VSCode daily with a
| couple of extensions and it's fast, never stutters and I
| never have to wait for anything, so I'm not sure where
| you pulled that one from.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's not an IDE, and it's actually pretty sluggish.
| didibus wrote:
| They already have a CLI that is similar to Claude Code:
| Amazon Q CLI, you can download it here:
| https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli
|
| It actually has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the
| subscription is better value than Claude Code, but hard to
| tell.
| __bjoernd wrote:
| It uses the same models as Claude Code. I've been using Q
| CLI a lot and love it, but I'm amazed by what Claude Code
| can do.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There are still people not even using an editor, but rather
| using vibe-coding apps like lovable.
|
| Also,I don't mean to be rude to cursor but the fact that they
| are literally just a vscode wrapper still, to this day makes
| me really crazy thinking that the value of an AI editor could
| be so high..
|
| I think it was the lack of competition really, Cursor (IMO)
| always felt like the biggest player, I think there was
| continue.dev before that, but that's all I know before
| Cursor.
|
| After Cursor became a hit, there are lot more things now like
| (Void editor?) etc.
|
| Also, if you Find Vscode editor slow, try zed. But like my
| brother said to me when I was shilling zed, Vscode is just
| for manipulating texts and using LSP. He personally didn't
| feel like it was there any meaningful slowness to Vscode even
| though he had tried zed. Zed has Ai stuff too iirc
|
| Now Sure, they could've created CLI, but there are a lot of
| really decent CLI like SST/opencode and even gemini cli.
| Though I have heard good things about claude code too.
|
| Honestly, I just think that any efforts in anything is cool.
| I just like it when there are a lot of options and so things
| stay a little competitive I guess.
| nsonha wrote:
| > just a vscode wrapper
|
| Isn't that like all software. Before Claude 4 and Copilot
| agent mode, Cursor/Cline did a lot of work under the hood
| to achieve the same agentic capabilities, that stuff has
| nothing to do with VSCode.
| moffkalast wrote:
| What kind of toaster are you running vscode on, it runs about
| as fast as any basic text editor even in VMs for me.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro
| is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for
| no reason.
| slacktivism123 wrote:
| 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.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| I use VSCode with Continue. It has a Code Helper Plugin,
| which peaks during use, but when idle it doesn't use any
| resource. Something is up with the Kiro version where some
| background task is running.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| See the NathanKP comment on the (grand parent post?), It
| was the indexing which was causing the resource
| utiliazation.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| For a large project, it seems to still be using high CPU
| (maybe continuously indexing)
| esafak wrote:
| Fortunately the next generation seems to be CLI based!
| Maybe we'll go back to native apps in the next generation.
| rcleveng wrote:
| 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,
| IntelliJ, NetBeans, JDeveloper, etc) and they worked
| reasonably well on the desktop, but had no path to offering
| a web hosted solution (like gitpod or codespaces)
|
| There are not a lot of options here, compiling down a
| native solution to wasm and running it in the browser would
| work, I'm not sure if the performance would be
| substantially better or more consistent across all OS'es
| and web unfortunately.
|
| So we are where we are :)
| dgfitz wrote:
| > 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.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >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.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Zed exists.
| imtringued wrote:
| I genuinely thought we have enough RAM since the 16GB era.
| Nope, they figured out a way to consume it all plus a dozen
| of GB in swap.
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. It was the indexing.
|
| Is there any way to control this? I have my
| files.watcherExclude setting, does it respect that?
| NathanKP wrote:
| I believe that the file indexing exclusion is based on
| .gitignore, not files.watcherExclude, but let me check on
| that and confirm.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| 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.
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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
| ActorNightly wrote:
| 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.
| sinatra wrote:
| Have you documented how you built this project using Kiro? Your
| learnings may help us get the best out of Kiro as we experiment
| with it for our medium+ size projects.
| NathanKP wrote:
| I've got a longer personal blogpost coming soon!
|
| But in the meantime I'm also the author of the "Learn by
| Playing" guide in the Kiro docs. It goes step by step through
| using Kiro on this codebase, in the `challenge` branch. You
| can see how Kiro performs on a series of tasks starting with
| light things like basic vibe coding to update an HTML page,
| then slightly deeper things like fixing some bugs that I
| deliberately left in the code, then even deeper to a full
| fledged project to add email verification and password reset
| across client, server, and infrastructure as code. There is
| also an intro to using hooks, MCP, and steering files to
| completely customize the behavior of Kiro.
|
| Guide link here: https://kiro.dev/docs/guides/learn-by-
| playing/
| epiccoleman wrote:
| > It's a fairly extensive codebase for an infinite crafting
| game, almost 95% AI coded, thanks to the power of Kiro:
| https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro
|
| This, along with the "CHALLENGE.md" and "ROADMAP.md" document,
| is an incredibly cool way to show off your project and to give
| people a playground to use to try it out. The game idea itself
| is pretty interesting too.
|
| It would be awesome if I ... didn't have to deal with AWS to
| use it. I guess maybe that might be a good use case for agentic
| coding: "Hey, Kiro - can you make this thing just use a local
| database and my Anthropic API key?"
|
| Complaining aside though, I think that's just such a cool
| framework for a demo. Nice idea.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Thanks a lot! I plan to fork the project and make a generic
| version that runs entirely locally using your GPU to do
| everything. My early tests ran pretty well on NVIDIA 5070. So
| that's next on my project list to open source in my free
| time. The only thing more fun that building an AI agent, is
| using it to build your own ideas!
| underlines wrote:
| 5070Ti user here: We are 150 people in a SME and most of
| our projects NDA for gov & defense clients absolutely
| forbid us to use any cloud based IDE tools like GitHub
| Copilot etc. Would love for this project to provide a BYOK
| and even Bring Your Own Inference Endpoint. You can still
| create licensing terms for business clients.
| hedgehog wrote:
| What models do you use that you've found to be powerful
| enough to be helpful?
| Aherontas wrote:
| I have the same question, do you use already an on prem
| RAG system?
| asib wrote:
| FYI: I'm trying Kiro out now, and the IDE keeps popping open
| the integrated terminal window of its own accord. Has done it
| multiple times, including when I don't even have the IDE window
| focussed on my desktop. Every 5-10 minutes it seems.
|
| Neither VSCode nor Cursor do this, so even if it's an extension
| triggering it somehow, the behaviour in Kiro is different to
| those other two.
| marviel wrote:
| nice! Can't agree more on Vibe Speccing.
|
| I wrote more about Spec Driven AI development here:
| https://lukebechtel.com/blog/vibe-speccing
| erichocean wrote:
| How much are you using Kiro to improve itself? 100% of the
| time? 10% of the time? Never?
| NathanKP wrote:
| It has grown over time as Kiro has developed. Many of the
| most recent features in Kiro were developed using Kiro
| specifications. We have a Twitch stream scheduled with some
| engineers from the Kiro team where we plan to take live Q&A
| about this in specific, how they are using Kiro to build
| Kiro, etc. I don't have the schedule setup yet, but we've got
| the channel setup here: https://www.twitch.tv/kirodotdev
| personjerry wrote:
| Why not deploy the game? I'd love to try it
| NathanKP wrote:
| I have a personal deployment of the game, but it costs money
| to run the LLM so I'm not sharing that with all of Hacker
| News haha. I've got an appsec ticket open to host an
| "official AWS" version where AWS pays the LLM bill, but that
| might take a while longer to get approved. For now the best
| way to experiment is playing with it locally.
|
| I'm also thinking of creating a fork of the project that is
| designed to run entirely locally using your GPU. I believe
| with current quantized models, and a decent GPU, you can have
| an adequate enough fully local experience with this game,
| even the dynamic image generation part.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Love the game! would be interesting to see an example of
| prompts used to do this.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Unfortunately, midway through the project I lost the file
| where I was keeping track of all the prompts I used as I
| built. I do have some of them, plan to publish a wrap up
| analysis of those at some point.
|
| If you were referring to the prompts inside of the game, you
| might find those fun and interesting. This one in particular
| is the heart of the game:
| https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-
| kiro/blob/main/serve...
| mkagenius wrote:
| Hello Nathan,
|
| I integrated[1] the recently released Apple Container (instead
| of shell) to run codes generated by Kiro. It works great!
|
| 1. CodeRunner: https://github.com/BandarLabs/coderunner
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Can you please stop shilling for this?
|
| HN comments aren't an ad network...
| thekevan wrote:
| Will the pricing include consideration for if someone if an
| Amazon Prime subscriber?
| apwell23 wrote:
| > 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.
| NathanKP wrote:
| 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.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > 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.
| a1j9o94 wrote:
| The above is saying more precise not completely precise.
| The overall point they're making is you still are
| responsible for the code you commit.
|
| If they are saying the code in this project was in line
| with what they would have written, I lean towards
| trusting their assessment.
| apwell23 wrote:
| I am not doubting 95% acceptance rate all. I've pure
| vibecoded many toy projects myself.
|
| > in line with what they would have written,
|
| point i am making is that they didn't know what they
| would've written. they had a rough overall idea but
| details were being accepted on the fly. They were trying
| out bunch of things and see what looks good based on a
| rough idea of what output should be.
|
| In a real world project you are not both product owner
| and coder.
| NathanKP wrote:
| To be clear I did not have a 95% acceptance rate. I'm
| saying that in the final published repo, 95% of the lines
| of code were written by AI, not by me. I discarded and
| refactored code along the way many times, but I did that
| by also using the AI. My end goal was to keep my hands
| off the code as much as possible and get better at
| describing exactly what I wanted from the AI.
| NathanKP wrote:
| > if you are accepting 95% of what random output is being
| given to you
|
| I am not, and don't expect to be able to do that for many
| years yet. The models aren't that good yet.
|
| I would estimate that I accepted perhaps 25% of the
| initial code output from the LLM. The other 75% of output
| I wasn't satisfied with I just unapplied and retried with
| a different prompt, or I refactored or mutated it using a
| followup prompt.
|
| In the final project 95% of the committed lines of code
| in the published version were written by AI, however
| there was probably 4x as much discarded AI generated code
| along the way that was also written by AI. Often the
| first take wasn't good enough so I modified it or
| refactored it, also using AI. Over the course of using
| the project I got better at providing more precise
| prompts that generated good code the first time, however,
| I rarely accepted the first draft of code back from Kiro
| without making followup prompts.
|
| A lot of people have a misguided thought that using AI
| means you just accept the first draft that AI returns.
| That's not the case. You absolutely should be reading the
| code, and iterating on it using followup prompts.
| dostick wrote:
| Does it work for Swift development and can it compile to test
| for compilation errors?
| Szpadel wrote:
| 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
| touristtam wrote:
| Maybe the fact that MSFT has been break extensions for fork
| is enough?
| orangebread wrote:
| Hi Nathan, this is awesome. I also discovered similar workflows
| and built SpecLinter:
| https://github.com/orangebread/speclinter-mcp
|
| Will be trying Kiro, excited to see how you approached
| implementing a similar idea!
| factorialboy wrote:
| What's with the edited title "it's Cursor clone".
|
| Unless it's literally a Cursor clone, I'd request to change it to
| describe the product category.
|
| Cursor by no means defines the whole category. Not even close.
| KomoD wrote:
| product category: "vscode with ai things slapped on top"
| limpingninja wrote:
| By vscode you mean atom clone with extra tools slapped on
| top, right?
| wg0 wrote:
| And with atom you mean Notepad++ with extra tools slapped
| on top?
| actualwitch wrote:
| To be fair, npp is not using electron. Atom is.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| To be even more fair, the category used to be sublime
| clones. Sublime was on a crazy run in the early 2010s and
| there were various attempts at an "Open source Sublime".
| dang wrote:
| We've replaced the title. (Submitted title was "AWS launches
| Kiro, its Cursor clone")
| guluarte wrote:
| loom mom, another vscode fork!
| lonestarwarrior wrote:
| I am a heavy Jetbrains user, I never liked the idea of Cursor. I
| embraced Claude Code immediately when it came out.
| jibe wrote:
| Are you using the Claude Code plugin, or switching back and
| forth between Claude Code and the Jetbrains IDE?
| lonestarwarrior wrote:
| With the plugin. CC runs in a terminal on the sidebar. The
| plugin does not only provide diff view for CC edits, it also
| gives CC access to diagnosis and all other IDE capabilities
| through MCP.
| williamzeng0 wrote:
| VSCode is way worse for large codebases and also much worse for
| Ruby, Golang, etc.
| brene wrote:
| wait, it's completely free during the preview period? That's a
| better deal than Cursor, Windsurf, or Claude Code. Gotta check it
| out
| suralind wrote:
| 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/TUI is the
| way to go for anyone that has a similar view.
|
| That said, I'm sure there's a very big user base (probably bigger
| than terminal group) that will enjoy using this and other GUI
| apps.
| joelthelion wrote:
| The nice thing about CLI/TUI is that you can keep using your
| editor or IDE of choice and chat with the AI on the side.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Totally agreed, which is why I'm sticking with my editor
| (neovim) regardless of whatever AI thing is hot and using tools
| outside/analogous to it, currently claude code
| znpy wrote:
| > 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
| suralind wrote:
| 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
| aquariusDue wrote:
| 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.
| TimMeade wrote:
| Every 6 months? It's turning into every two weeks. Sticking
| with claude code. Its working beautifully for us.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| 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?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I like aider's solution of encapsulating each edit in a git
| commit; I hope that gets widely adopted.
| olivermuty wrote:
| Add two lines to CLAUDE.md and claude code can do this as
| well :)
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Unfortunately aider is showing its age. It is great for
| what it does, but better LLMs + "agentic" have shown that
| you can get more in the swe domain.
|
| There was a paper recently where they had an LLM evolve
| tool harnesses and got ~20% more than w/ aider on the
| benchmark they used, so it's pretty clear that the models
| + tools (+better harness) are better than just aider.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| 1) You can plug in any model into aider 2) It can be
| quite agentic
|
| > evolve tool harnesses
|
| Claude code & Gemini cli etc. don't do this either
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I love aider and I've been using it
| since the early days. I'm just commenting on the overall
| "gains" and imo they are higher with the latest tools
| (claude code, gemini, etc).
|
| As for 1), I agree but you force the model to work within
| aider's constraints. Claude4 for example excels at the
| agentic flow and it's better at that than providing the
| diffs that aider expects.
|
| As for the last sentence, I disagree. They are evolving
| the stack, and more importantly they are evolving both at
| the same time, stack + LLM. That's the main reason they
| all subsidise use atm, they are gathering data to improve
| both. If I were to place a bet right now, I'd say that
| provider_tool + provider_LLM > 3rd party tool + same
| model in the short, medium and long term.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Oh, that's a good point, I misunderstood you to mean: The
| LLM writes it's own harnesses etc.
| manojlds wrote:
| Each edit as in every little change?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Yes. Then you squash to make real commits.
| qsort wrote:
| Claude Code is definitely more agentic, but you can use it
| in a variety of ways. In Plan Mode it won't touch the code,
| and by default it asks you to accept every single diff.
| With IDE integration you can definitely just highlight some
| code and ask questions, I don't see why that workflow
| wouldn't work.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It could be better. I think the PMs and investors and
| decision makers at these companies are running with a "we
| want to replace / automate developers" philosophy, while
| these tools are actually best at _augmenting_ developers.
| And so they 're sorta builing with this "I'll do everything
| and ask you for confirmation" (and basically encourage you
| to give me blanket permission).
|
| In reality these tools would be best if they took a more
| socratic method, a more interactive pair programming
| approach. So instead of giving you a blanket diff to accept
| or refuse or "No, and here's some changes" -- it should be
| more dialog oriented.
|
| Of all of them so far though, I think Claude Code is
| closest to this. IF you prompt it right you can have a much
| more interactive workflow, and I find that most productive.
| dangus wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You're sort of technically correct but I wouldn't really
| describe it this way exactly. You have to proactively
| accept or reject all changes to your files in some way.
|
| It is almost impossible to accidentally commit code you
| don't want.
|
| It's not really an edit in the same sense as an unstated
| change. It doesn't even really do that until you accept the
| result.
|
| It's basically saving you a UI step compared to ask mode
| with basically no downside.
| TimMeade wrote:
| We tend to allow this. But you can review the diff before
| you allow it. It seems easier to say "roll that back" or
| hit esc if you see it doing things you dont like and then
| correcting it. I have to say the velocity is insane of
| coding this way. We also commit a LOT and explicitly dont
| allow claude to push code ever. That way we can roll back
| if needed, but honestly it's pretty rare to need to. The
| MAX plan is a must to work this way though.
| memco wrote:
| > 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?
|
| With cursor you get reasonably flexible control at many
| levels. You can have it only suggest changes that you have
| to apply manually or you can have it make automatic changes
| with various ways to review, change, reject or accept. I
| usually have the changes made automatically but don't
| accept the changes automatically. Cursor has a UI that lets
| you review each edit individually, for the whole file or
| all files. Depending on the situation I will use whichever
| level is appropriate. The UI also allows you to revert
| changes or you can ask the AI to undo or rework a change
| that you just approved so there's plenty of ways to do
| large changes without giving up control. There's also a
| stop button you can use to interrupt mid-stream if the work
| it's doing isn't what you want. It isn't flawless but I
| haven't found myself in a corner where I couldn't get back
| to a happy path.
| NathanKP wrote:
| I love Claude Code too, and it definitely has it's place. I
| think that IDE's have a few advantages over CLI tools though.
| In specific the IDE has a lot more contextual information
| such as what files you have open, warnings from linters or
| type checkers, information from LSP, etc.
|
| I think it is entirely possible to build a fantastic CLI tool
| for coding, and the CLI tools for coding already work well
| enough, but there is just more context info available inside
| of an IDE, therefore the ceiling is higher when working with
| an agent that runs inside of the IDE. Context is king for LLM
| results, and IDE's just have more context.
|
| Over time I'm sure we'll see tools like Claude Code support
| everything that an IDE can do, but for now if you want to
| reach the same ceiling you still have to glue together a very
| custom setup with MCP tool use, and that has the downside of
| introducing additional tool use latency, compared to an IDE
| that is able to source context directly from the IDE's
| internal API, and provide that to the LLM nearly instantly.
| TimMeade wrote:
| I use claude code in vscode. Cmd-Esc opens a claude code
| tab. Then /ide conects to the vscode and it's all like
| cursor at that point.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Same here - in fact, I just recently cancelled my Cursor
| subscription because Claude Code + VSCode seems just as
| good. I think Cursor is a decent product and some of the
| UX it puts around LLM interaction is helpful - but I just
| can't really justifying paying Cursor to middleman my
| requests to LLM providers when Claude Pro is $20 / month.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| suralind wrote:
| Not really, even at work I got to test couple different AI
| solutions and the experience is always slightly different,
| even if the editor is the same, for the most part. It's the
| tiny things like using the prompt template, or opening the
| panel. (I could, of course, make an attempt to customize the
| keybindings, but why bother when it changes so quickly.)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The entire idea that "I'm too cool to use an IDE" I find
| kind of dumb. I was using a Turbo C IDE in college in 1994,
| Visual Studio until 2019 and since then VSCode.
| Oreb wrote:
| I don't think "I'm too cool to use an IDE" was the point
| being made. The point is that having to switch IDEs every
| time the number one AI coding tool changes would be
| annoying.
| guluarte wrote:
| only if you use vscode, I think TUIs are a better option
| since a lot of us use other ides than vscode
| theturtletalks wrote:
| 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.
| rob wrote:
| I think IDE-based tools like Cursor, VS Code, etc, will
| win out in the long term, especially as the younger
| generation grows up.
|
| In the short term though, I think CLI-based tools like
| Claude Code are taking off because hardcore developers
| see them as the last "vestige" they have in separating
| themselves from the "noobs." They know there's still a
| good portion of the public who don't know how to use the
| terminal, install packages, or even know what Linux is.
| guluarte wrote:
| I think what is going to win is a tool independent to
| your ide to run your agents, it could be a cli or a gui.
| retinaros wrote:
| You dreaming. The ui is gonna be like google for code. A
| voice chat and an instruction/search bar that is it. The
| model is the product
| placardloop wrote:
| 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.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Claude Code really was at the right place at the right
| time. Cursor started putting new models under their MAX
| plan that charges per use and I started getting worse
| results with Cursor over time as they optimized costs. I
| started looking into Cline/RooCode when Cursor did this
| because I knew they were in the squeezing customers stage
| now. I used those for a while with Sonnet thru
| OpenRouter, but Anthropic had the genius plan of bundling
| Claude Code with their Max plan. That made a lot of users
| jump ship from Cursor and the difference is night and day
| for me. Yes I pay 5 times more than I did with cursor,
| but still less than using API credits and the results for
| me have been superior.
| nsonha wrote:
| Claude Code is what it is because of Claude, TUI or not
| isn't really the point. What makes IDEs lose to TUIs is
| that the agentic models can really do more than coding
| and is evolving toward a hands-off kind of workflow. A
| clunky IDE is too much for that, but TUI is not the way
| either. When has TUI ever been mainstream?
|
| Agentic tools of the future will be rich notebook/chat
| interface that's available in all form factors, which is
| to say, most likely web/cross platform apps.
| yencabulator wrote:
| You can have an agent loop in your IDE, I don't see why
| anything makes "IDEs lose to TUIs" there.
|
| If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in
| the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully
| automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and
| the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every
| step one at a time.
|
| I _hate_ trying to copy paste in /out of Claude Code's
| unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.
|
| Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet
| as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently
| IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.
|
| https://zed.dev/docs/ai/agent-panel
| ImaCake wrote:
| I just use VSCode with copilot and don't worry about these
| re-skins. I don't get a lot of time to write code so I
| certainly don't have time to learn a new IDE for a small
| boost to my productivity when vscode gets me most of the way
| already.
|
| If these re-skinned vscode IDEs have any good ideas I'm sure
| Microsoft will steal them anyway.
| lxgr wrote:
| Them all being based on VS Code makes it all the more
| frustrating to have to switch IDEs to use them.
| factorialboy wrote:
| CLI -> Voice & Gesture UI
| eulers_secret wrote:
| YUP! This is why I've settled on Aider and it's "IDE
| integration" (watches all files for comments that end in "AI!",
| which then invokes the AI). I can then use it with whatever
| editor I prefer. I view the vscode mono-culture as a bad thing.
| I also like I can use any AI backend I like, which is really
| how it should be: Vendor lock-in tools are bad, remember?
|
| I guess you lose tab-completion suggestions, but I am not a fan
| of those compared to 'normal' tab-complete (if backed by an
| lang server). If I want AI, I'll write a short comment and
| invoke the tool explicitly.
|
| EDIT: Of course, it really depends an your usecase. I
| maintain/upgrade C code libs and utils; I really cannot speak
| to what works best for your env! Webdev is truly a different
| world.
|
| EDIT2: Can't leave this alone for some reason, the backend
| thing is a big deal. Switching between Claude/Gemini/Deekseek
| and even rando models like Qwen or Kimi is awesome, they can
| fill in each other's holes or unblock a model which is 'stuck'.
| seydor wrote:
| people are trying to find a moat that will bind their userbase.
| Browsers, editors, apps etc. There must be a format that locks
| users in so they will try them all one after another
| crinkly wrote:
| This is why you will have to pry vim and my own brain out of my
| cold dead hands.
|
| It's not just the IDE but the ML model you are selling yourself
| to. I see my colleagues atrophy before me. I see their tools
| melt in their hands. I am rapidly becoming the only person
| functionally capable of reason on my own. It's very very weird.
|
| When the model money dries up what's going to happen?
| ryandvm wrote:
| I dunno. There's also a good chance that you just end up
| being left behind like graybeards that only wanted to code in
| C and assembler.
|
| I too am old enough to have seen a lot of unnecessary tech
| change cycles, and one thing I've noticed about this industry
| is no matter how foolish a trend was, we almost never unwind
| it.
| crinkly wrote:
| I get paid a fuck load of money to write C. Your point is?
|
| As for trends, I've been around long enough to have seen
| this cycle a couple of times...
| ryandvm wrote:
| > I get paid a fuck load of money to write C. Your point
| is?
|
| My point is there aren't many of you, are there?
|
| All things considered, keeping up with the industry
| trends is generally a more reliable career path.
| crinkly wrote:
| Correct but we are _never_ fungible. That's the trick for
| a reliable career.
|
| I've survived every single layoff season since 1995.
| knowsuchagency wrote:
| Ironically, Claude Code has me working in lower-level
| languages with more low-level tools than ever before,
| simply because of how powerful it is, particularly as a
| terminal tool. I've always been more of a GUI person, but
| now the editor I use most often is Helix.
|
| If I've atrophied in certain aspects of my thinking, I
| honestly think I've more than made up for it in learning
| how to engineer the context and requirements for Claude
| Code more effectively and to quickly dive in to fix
| things without taking my hands off the keyboard and
| leaving the terminal.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| > I dunno. There's also a good chance that you just end up
| being left behind like graybeards that only wanted to code
| in C and assembler.
|
| All the people I know in the US with those skills make huge
| amounts of money- at least, the ones who haven't already
| retired rich.
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. The ones who maintain high risk system software that
| allows all these machines to be able to train LLMs,
| compile the systems software or maintaining systems that
| ingest 2% of the worlds traffic are the ones who are
| making a lot of money out of this.
|
| Not the ones maintaining frontend web apps or "vibe
| coding".
| bowsamic wrote:
| Remaining skilled while those around you atrophy is never a
| bad decision
| polynomial wrote:
| > 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.
| didibus wrote:
| They have a CLI similar to Claude Code already:
| https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli
| yakattak wrote:
| All of these agentic IDEs could just be visual studio code
| plugins. They're likely not because how do you secure VC
| funding for a plugin?
| umeshunni wrote:
| More importantly - how do you monetize a plugin?
| tacker2000 wrote:
| There are lots of ecosystems where pro users pay for
| plugins to get extra features. See the ecommerce domain,
| jetbrains, even ms teams has plugins that are paid.
|
| VSCode has some popular paid plugins like LSPs or some for
| git.
|
| I dont see why it wouldnt be possible to monetize a VSCode
| plugin.
| dcreater wrote:
| But Continue and a bunch of others literally did that.
|
| The better question is why is there this horrible monoculture
| in SW startups around raising money through VCs? We need more
| regular businesses who build something useful and charge a
| fair price. Period.
| apwell23 wrote:
| this project was conceived when cursor was the king of
| vibecoding. Everyone thought being an IDE would give you so
| much more power.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've been thinking about developing a VSIX for Visual Studio
| 2022 that wraps my typical ChatGPT flow in the intellisense UX.
|
| I don't mind that everyone is all-in with VSCode now, but I
| already paid $500 for the big-boy version and I've got 20k
| hours on it.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| Andys wrote:
| Try kilocode - https://kilocode.ai/ Its a VScode extension and
| allows different LLMs to be used.
| xnx wrote:
| Title should be: "Introducing Kiro"
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Is this another VS Code fork or did they just completely rip the
| VS code ui?
| xena wrote:
| It's another VS Code fork!
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Had they not forked VS Code the low value quips would reverse
| to: "why didn't you just fork VS Code?"
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Fork and an old one
| cube00 wrote:
| Hopefully better then the hell that is trying to use Amazon Q for
| development.
| angelmm wrote:
| 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.
| suralind wrote:
| I love Zed as an editor/IDE without ANY AI/LLM features. I
| think the AI support in Zed is actually pretty decent and I'm
| still using it out of habit (actively trying to use more TUI
| for AI).
|
| But at the same time, it's my biggest worry that they will
| continue on the AI and pollute the project with too much junk.
| I gotta trust the smart minds behind it will find a way to
| balance this trend.
| angelmm wrote:
| Totally. I think Zed has its own value proposition. That's
| why I never put them close to other editors like Cursor at
| the beginning.
|
| Lately, I started putting it together due to all the AI
| excitement. People try it because of the AI capabilities to
| find an IDE that works for them.
|
| I hope Zed continues providing new amazing features in all
| the areas.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)
|
| And Google killed it.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| It makes we attracted to Vim/Emacs. They'll be the same until I
| die.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I'm surprised no one is gobbling up jetbrains.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| They have been cleaning up and getting rid of projects, so
| seems to be preparing for it.
| williamzeng0 wrote:
| do you mean jetbrains ai team?
| ArcaneMoose wrote:
| This is exactly how I've been building software with AI lately.
| Getting AI to create a detailed plan with phases, then implement
| and use a separate AI to review the code. It works quite well!
| Curious to see how well it works when implemented directly in the
| IDE
| delfinom wrote:
| At what point does the manager fire you and just let the AIs
| have at it ;)
| NathanKP wrote:
| Realistically, none of the models can function fully
| autonomously at this point. You still need a skilled human at
| the helm. However, AI tools definitely change how the human
| works. I find that I spend a lot less time thinking about
| easy things, and a lot more time thinking about hard things.
|
| Basically, the AI fast forwards through the easy stuff and I
| just spend all day jumping directly from hard problem to hard
| problem.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Nah, you never voluntarily reduce headcount. Headcount is
| what keeps your salary coming. Any manager worth their salt
| would use this newfound productivity to infringe on other
| teams' domains: Hostile Takeover => More Headcount =>
| Promotion. We'll see a lot of attempted empire building over
| the next couple years while all this gets sorted out.
| ranman wrote:
| Caylent has been testing this for quite some time and I have to
| say it's an interesting take. With claude code you can shift
| between planning and coding modes and this offers a similar
| approach. The speed is quite good and the results are solid. The
| spec approach is solid but it takes a learning curve. Some of the
| tooling and autojumps take a bit to get used to because they
| differ from the other IDE approaches.
|
| Overall I do believe this has accelerated our development and I'm
| interested to see where it goes. I don't think it's a direct
| comparison to claude code or cursor - its a different approach
| with some overlap.
| dangus wrote:
| 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 yourself.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Given the rapidly-changing state of AI, "half-baked" is a
| moving target. The Q console support was never great, but it's
| materially worse than it was a year ago, relative to what could
| be built today.
| dangus wrote:
| I would also like to add that forking VScode is not a value
| add. Just publish a VSCode extension.
| placardloop wrote:
| AWS really shot themselves in the foot with naming everything
| "Amazon Q <insert suffix here>". 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.
| xena wrote:
| This doesn't support development containers
| (https://containers.dev), which means I can't insulate my machine
| from AI tooling. Not keen on this unless it's somehow earth-
| shattering.
| Tokumei-no-hito wrote:
| why doesn't it support them?
| tristan957 wrote:
| The remote containers extension on VSCode is proprietary.
| Cursor had to write their remote extension suite.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Im.not a dev so i dont use these vs code forks...
|
| How is one fork different from cursor or kiro or something else?
|
| Arent these like what i assume skinning chromium or something
| more ?
| gsibble wrote:
| Am I the only one who finds AI not very helpful?
|
| Just this morning, Cursor was giving me a ton of incorrect tab
| completions. When I use prompts, it tends to break more than it
| fixes. It's still a lot faster to write by hand. Lots of
| libraries that take *arguments in Python also cannot be groked by
| AI.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Of course you aren't the only one, and I'm sure you know that
| you aren't the only one.
|
| I doubt these tools will ever convince every last person on
| every single use case, so the existence of those people isn't
| exactly an indictment.
| lvl155 wrote:
| You have to put in some effort to put in the guardrails and
| scaffolds to make it produce what you want. It's definitely not
| out-of-the-box deal.
| neutronicus wrote:
| At work it's supremely unhelpful. Giant C++ codebase, big
| enough to choke even traditional analysis tools like
| IntelliSense, lots of proprietary libraries.
|
| I have found it extremely useful for spinning up personal
| projects though.
|
| My wife bought us Claude subscriptions and she's been straight-
| up vibe coding an educational game for our son with impressive
| results (she is a UX designer so a lot more attuned to vibes
| than gen-pop). I'm picking up some computational physics
| research threads I dropped in grad school and Claude Code has
| been incredible at everything _besides_ physics and HPC. Define
| and parse an input file format, integrate I /O libraries, turn
| my slapdash notes into LaTeX with nice TiKz diagrams, etc.
|
| Hoping I can transfer over some insights to make it more
| helpful at work.
| Velorivox wrote:
| I really like that the testimonials are linked directly to the
| Github accounts of the contributors. I've seen a lot of websites
| where it's questionable at best whether the people reviewing the
| product even exist.
|
| It's also interesting that the pricing is in terms of
| "interactions" rather than tokens. I don't believe I've seen that
| before.
| aspittel wrote:
| I've been testing Kiro for a few months, and yes, it's an agentic
| IDE like many others. However, a lot of the features are
| different - the spec driven development is a game changer. It
| feels like you're truly software engineering versus vibing - you
| break a problem into small, solvable steps using specs. So are
| agent hooks - there are great use cases like updating Asana
| statuses or syncing your design system with Figma.
| jackmenotti wrote:
| No autocomplete? Why? I mean is the current trend to leave all
| the control from the experienced dev hands and just review the
| final code? Not my cup of tea, I'll keep using Cursor and "vibe
| code" with smart rewrites
| NathanKP wrote:
| Kiro does have autocomplete. It's just not advertised on the
| product page as a star feature.
|
| In my experience using Kiro you are still going to be hands on
| with the code. Personally I choose to turn AI powered
| autocomplete off because when I do touch the code manually it's
| usually for the purposes of working on something tricky that AI
| would likely not get right in autocomplete either.
|
| However, the Kiro autocomplete is average in capability in my
| experience, and you can absolutely use it to write code by hand
| as well.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Big opportunity to be the first open source model agnostic Claude
| Code with widespread adoption. You'll be the vim, the Linux, the
| nginx, the MySQL of agentic coding. Who will it be? It's wide
| open right now.
| NathanKP wrote:
| This is much more tricky than you'd think. Claude Code and
| other similar tools only work as well as they do because the
| prompts that power it have been tuned to match a specific
| model.
|
| When you make a tool that is "model agnostic" you also make a
| tool that is unable to play to the individual strengths of each
| model, or you set yourself up for a massive, multiplicative
| effort of trying to tune your tool to every single popular
| model out there, even though some of the models are drastically
| less capable than others.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I think this is where the stickiness is with generation; very
| little chance I'm switching from Claude Code unless something
| exceptionally better comes along at this point. Assuming I'm not
| abnormal, this is a huge win for Anthropic.
| hmate9 wrote:
| From the little I've played with it so far, its spec-driven
| format seems to give better results when making large changes to
| code.
| premn wrote:
| Kiro's spec based development is something that's new (for me
| atleast) and it's pretty good.
| ghimanshu6 wrote:
| AWSome KIROOOOOO
| pvartist wrote:
| Impressive to see an AI IDE tackle the real world complexity of
| software development. Love the separation of modes- Vibe for
| ideation, Spec for clarity, and Agent Hooks for ongoing
| maintenance. The spec-driven approach feels like a natural
| evolution beyond the typical AI prototype tools. Excited to try
| it out on a live project!
| badaldavda wrote:
| Awesome! Tried it and I should say, adds structure to my vibe
| coding. Loving it.
| croskcool wrote:
| Why couldn't this be built inside Q?
| nullandvoid wrote:
| I'm already burnt from amazon Q which was forced onto us in an
| alpha state in my workplace - was miles behind competitors for a
| full year, before we finally won the battle to move back to co-
| pilot.
|
| Going to take a while before I trust any AWS AI related tooling
| won't just be abandoned / mis-managed after my prior experience.
| claudecodefan wrote:
| Too late to the party. Feels like the market has moved onto
| Claude Code and terminal agents. I use Claude Code extensively
| and love the flexibility and fluidity. Also works well through
| the terminal integration in IDE.
| admn2 wrote:
| Is there a way to preview changes in CC before "accepting" like
| you can in Cursor?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| does this have any carveouts for CDK or other aws services? I've
| found that sonnet sometimes struggles to know what params to use,
| while amazon Q despite being on paper a worse model, can. It
| seems this uses sonnet, but are there any adjustments?
| lvl155 wrote:
| Unless it offers me something substantially better than VSCode, I
| am not gonna switch and it has a lot to do with unsupported
| extensions. For now, I think UX preference has to be CLI with web
| gui wrapper where you can pick models, agents, requirements, etc
| and let that run anywhere, even headless. I don't like how these
| guys (as in all the VSCode wrappers) are trying to sucker people
| onto their platform to lock you in.
|
| Edit: I know there's manual VSIX route.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Kiro is Vscode (forked from the open source version). I
| imported all the settings and extensions into it from VSCode,
| worked fine.
| Tokumei-no-hito wrote:
| what are the unsupported extensions? i thought the support had
| to do with marketplace access (search / download / update) but
| if you already have the vsix it can be installed in any vscode
| fork
| SyrupThinker wrote:
| Some of Microsoft's extensions are licensed such that they
| may only be used with their own products (i.e. the official
| VS Code they offer for download, etc.). This already affects
| Cursor for example:
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dotnettools/issues/1909
| kixiQu wrote:
| Hey, a cute logo! I didn't know AWS allowed cute things.
| storus wrote:
| So we have another ugly VSCode clone with the same legal/support
| issues as all the other clones, but without any vibe-coding
| worthy assists like voice dictation/control or any other major
| differentiator. Just another "me too" project from AWS to scratch
| some product manager itch and commoditize the complement of some
| competitor.
| roficas wrote:
| awesome tool!
| trenchgun wrote:
| Kiro in Finnish means "a curse".
| mcraiha wrote:
| More modern would be Kirous.
| chandureddyvari wrote:
| I use Roo code with orchestrator(Boomerang) mode which pretty
| much has similar workflow. The orchestrator calls the architect
| to design the specs, and after iterating and agreeing on the
| approach, it is handed over to Code mode to execute the tasks.
| Google Gemini 2.5 pro is pretty good at orchestration due to its
| 1M context and I use claude sonnet 4 for code mode.
|
| What else does Kiro do differently?
|
| Edit: The hooks feature looks nifty. How is the memory management
| handled? Any codebase indexing etc? Support to add external MCP
| servers like context7 etc?
| touristtam wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have a write up on this setup I (we) could
| follow?
| aliljet wrote:
| I'm a little confused about how pricing works here. What is an
| 'agentic interaction' and how does that translate to dollars? And
| how does this work with models that are differently priced???
| t14000 wrote:
| Why do I need to log in to a text editor?
| fHr wrote:
| Amazon ewwwww
| johntarter wrote:
| Is there any way to move the chat window to the primary side bar?
| Having two side bars open takes up a lot of space. Not sure why
| this pattern persists in these VScode forks.
| duderific wrote:
| Generally in VSCode and its clones you can drag the window
| anywhere you like. I've been using my Copilot in the lower area
| which spans multiple panels, to give myself a little more
| viewing space.
| alexts-aws wrote:
| I tried Kiro just to test the tool and I was able to create a
| small order application. I liked it that that it created the
| documentation including planning and test scenarios. I will
| continue using the tool to create more complex apps.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I love the emphasis on specs here; this is something I do with
| Claude Code (maintain a set of specs in text as we work).
|
| I always keep the readme and some basic architecture docs (using
| markdown/mermaid) updated as I go, and I often just work on those
| rather than on code with Claude, because I find the value it
| offers is less in code generation and more in helping me document
| the rubber ducking process into useful schematics and
| architecture.
|
| What can Kiro offer that's meaningfully better than what I'm
| already doing? I can take my system anywhere Claude Code and my
| repos can go, using whatever editor I like. Does Kiro have some
| special sauce for making this approach work better? Maybe some
| DSL it uses for more succinct and actionable diagrams and plans?
|
| As much as I like the idea, I find it so hard to abandon a
| process I've been working on for months, using tools I'm already
| productive with.
|
| Also, will pricing essentially be bedrock pricing, or will there
| be a value-add margin tacked on?
| NathanKP wrote:
| > Does Kiro have some special sauce for making this approach
| work better?
|
| I'd like to think so, but you'd have to compare the results to
| what you are currently doing to see how you feel about it. I
| personally love the format that it uses to define requirements,
| and the details of the software design docs that it writes
| (including mermaid diagrams)
|
| > will pricing essentially be bedrock pricing, or will there be
| a value-add margin tacked on?
|
| The pricing is a flat rate, with a cap on number of
| interactions per month. Each human driven "push" for Kiro to do
| something is an interaction toward your limit, but Kiro may
| work autonomously for many turns based on an interaction, and
| will produce significant amounts of code from a single
| interaction.
|
| More details here: https://kiro.dev/pricing/
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Ah, thanks for the pricing link. I saw 'Kiro is free to use
| during preview' or similar and assumed pricing is hidden.
|
| At $39/month, is 3000 interactions a high limit? I use Claude
| Code on the $30 plan (I think), and routinely hit limits. I'm
| not ready to jump to the next tier, though. I think it's
| $200/month, and the NGO I work for isn't prepared to throw
| that kind of cash at developers (I'm second-rate here; the
| science comes first)
| SamDc73 wrote:
| CC have $20 and $100 and a $200 tiers
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Right, thank you. I pay ~$30 CAD, but the other tier is
| $200 USD. I should just sick to USD.
| NathanKP wrote:
| It's hard to directly compare, but 3000 interactions should
| be very, very high. Think of each of these 3000
| interactions as you supplying a prompt that potentially
| runs for 3-5 minutes of Kiro iterating away on writing
| code. With appropriately sized prompts (most likely aided
| by spec mode), you could write a ridiculous amount of code.
|
| For reference 3000 interactions * assumed 3 mins of AI work
| per interaction / 60 mins per hour / 8 working hours per
| day equals 18.75 working days of nonstop back to back AI
| coding. Typical month has 20-23 working days. But
| realistically you likely won't be using Kiro nonstop all
| day back to back, so 3000 interactions per month should
| more than cover your work month.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Thanks, this is exactly what I wondered. In practical
| terms I can't imagine hitting that limit.
|
| It's a bit more than I pay in CAD, but I'd pay quite a
| bit more just to stop hitting the limits I have with
| Claude, even if the rest of the service was identical.
| It's a pain. My usage is also very bursty so I spend
| several days getting no usage, then repeatedly hit limits
| while I brainstorm and spec things out.
|
| I'm thinking out loud here in case it's useful feedback.
| It seems like a great pricing schemes for my use case.
| 44za12 wrote:
| What models are supported, can we add custom models? I'm
| struggling to add Kimi K2 to cursor and surf.
| acd wrote:
| Not amazed! Tell me one good reason I should use it?
|
| Lets see EU US data privacy shield gone. Aws a bunch of open
| source tools gobbled together with proprietary source. Trust in
| made in US cloud platform tools is gone!
| didibus wrote:
| For anyone wondering, Amazon already offers an Agentic coding CLI
| similar to Claude Code: https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-
| developer-cli
|
| It has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the subscription is
| better value than Claude Code, but hard to tell.
|
| It supports MCP as well.
|
| Amazon Q also has a VC Code and IntelliJ Idea plugin too, Kiro
| goes beyond what you can do as a plugin in VS Code though,
| similar to why Cursor had to fork VS Code.
| artdigital wrote:
| Q CLI is great. It's basically Claude models but pretty much
| unlimited and only for $20
|
| Not as polished as Claude Code but also a bit price difference
| SyrupThinker wrote:
| That sounds too good to be true, and it seems like they are
| indeed introducing a usage system similar to their
| competitors next month?
|
| > Starting August 1, 2025, we're introducing a new pricing
| plan for Amazon Q Developer designed to make things simpler
| and more valuable for developers.
|
| > Pro Tier: Expanded limits $19/mo. per user
|
| > 1,000 agentic requests per month included (starting
| 8/1/2025)
|
| - https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing/
|
| Previously agentic use was apparently "free", but with a set
| deadline in June, so it seems like this was just for a
| testing phase?
| touristtam wrote:
| 50 request per month? Am I reading that correctly? If
| that's the case it is pityful.
| smcleod wrote:
| Q CLI has so many issues though, injects so much junk into you
| shell profiles it can slow down your terminal invocations by
| seconds, and it doesn't support standard streamableHttp / SSE
| MCP servers.
| didibus wrote:
| That's for the shell auto-complete feature which I turn off.
| smcleod wrote:
| It's not that simple: https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-
| developer-cli/issues/844
| grogenaut wrote:
| just turn those off, it's just 2 includes one at the top and
| one at the bottom of your shell... file a ticket about making
| it optional or not. I believe that the shell integration /
| autocomplete is where they started the product so it's
| probably one of those core features in the product team's
| minds.
|
| I generally like the integration but in some cases it's
| getting in the way of other ai that is runnin q to quit and
| all of a sudden its in q... I renamed it to amazonq and
| removed it from my zshrc and added it as a command to
| integrate, amazonqinit
| smcleod wrote:
| I'm the one that logged this:
| https://github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli/issues/844
| Amazon really have dropped the ball with fixing it.
| tmvphil wrote:
| I turn that stuff off and just use `q chat` for everything,
| which actually works very well in my experience.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I'll stick with my gentic IDE & write my own bugs.
| qq66 wrote:
| How do I know that this is an AWS product? This should be on an
| Amazon domain or the blog should be on an Amazon domain that
| links to the site.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| So I am pretty sure that there is some aws/amazon service which
| can provide gpu's / model inference too.
|
| I read it (I think) in one of the comment that There is a model
| picker that currently allows you to switch between Claude Sonnet
| 4.0 and Claude Sonnet 3.7
|
| So is this just using Claude?
|
| I really thought that the advantages of using Kiro might really
| be that of the leverage that Amazon Gpu's infrastructure could
| provide, maybe even some discounts to lure people to Kiro.
|
| I am pretty sure that a lot of people will ask you the same
| question, But I would really appreciate it if you could answer me
| this question in preferably simple terms: "Why Kiro? Why not all
| the other stuff that has come before it and the stuff that will
| come after it"
|
| Also I am really having some dejavu but while writing this
| comment, has the title of this post changed, I swear I saw
| something written in the header with Amazon and now I don't see
| it. honestly, I am really being so off-topic but after seeing
| this name change of the post, I really wish if that there was
| some website that could track all the name changes of posts that
| happen in HN, because I was completely baffled by this name
| change or I am being totally paranoid.
| pqdbr wrote:
| The previous title stated Kiro as being "Amazon's Cursor
| clone", which I agree was not adequate.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| My suspicions were right that the name had something to do
| with amazon because I went into this thread thinking about
| Amazon's unique position in this market.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| It does use AWS infrastructure, ie Bedrock which supports many
| different models.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Ohh I forgot that anthropic uses AWS Bedrock (I think?,
| right?) That checks out. This is really cool project!
| akdev1l wrote:
| From my understanding Anthropic is independent but they
| offer Claude as an offering through Bedrock
| retinaros wrote:
| What is the difference between kiro and having a rule file in
| claude code / cursor / cline saying << always start designing
| before coding. Create a .md file for specs, ask the user for it
| if it is not there? >>. You can just prompt the specs or whatever
| feature is in this IDE.
|
| Claude 4 can do it all already.
| aaronvg wrote:
| super interesting to see how this is marketed:
|
| - Created by an AWS team but aws logo is barely visible at the
| bottom.
|
| - Actually cute logo and branding.
|
| - Focuses on the lead devs front and center (which HN loves).
| Makes it seem less like a corporation and more like 2 devs
| working on their project / or an actual startup.
|
| - The comment tone of "hey ive been working on this for a year"
| also makes it seem as if there weren't 10 6-pagers written to
| make it happen (maybe there weren't?).
|
| - flashy landing page
|
| Props to the team. Wish there were more projects like this to
| branch out of AWS. E.g. Lightsail should've been launched like
| this.
| stillpointlab wrote:
| I love all of this experimentation in how to effectively use AIs
| to co-create output with human steering. This pattern, of the
| human human focusing on the high-level and the AI focusing on the
| low level feels like a big win.
|
| In some sense, we are starting with a very high-level and
| gradually refining the idea to a lower and lower levels of
| detail. It is structured hierarchical thinking. Right now we are
| at 3 levels: requirement -> spec -> code. Exposing each of these
| layers as structured text documents (mostly Markdown right now it
| seems) is powerful since each level can be independently
| reviewed. You can review the spec before the code is written,
| then review the code before it gets checked in.
|
| My intuition is that this pattern will be highly effective for
| coding. And if we prove that out at scale, we should start
| asking: how does this pattern translate to other activities? How
| will this affect law, medicine, insurance, etc. Software is the
| tip of the iceberg and if this works then there are many possible
| avenues to expand this approach, and many potential startups to
| serve a growing market.
|
| The key will be managing all of the documents, the levels of
| abstraction and the review processes. This is a totally tractable
| problem.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > Exposing each of these layers as structured text documents
|
| If we take it far enough, we could end up with a well
| structured syntax with a defined vocabulary for specifying what
| the computer should do that is rigorously followed in the
| implemented code. You could think of it as some kind of a ...
| language for .... programming the computer. Mind blowing.
| stillpointlab wrote:
| I get you are being sarcastic, but lets actually consider
| your idea more broadly.
|
| - Machine code
|
| - Assembly code
|
| - LLVM
|
| - C code (high level)
|
| - VM IR (byte code)
|
| - VHLL (e.g. Python/Javascript/etc)
|
| So, we already have hierarchical stacks of structured text.
| The fact that we are extending this to higher tiers is in
| some sense inevitable. Instead of snark, we could genuinely
| explore this phenomenon.
|
| LLMs are allowing us to extend this pattern to domains other
| than specifying instructions to processors.
| a5c11 wrote:
| And we re-invent the wheel basically. You have to use very
| specific prompts to make the computer do what you want, so
| why not just, you know... program it? It's not that hard.
|
| Natural language is trying to be a new programming
| language, one of many, but it's the least precise one imho.
| stillpointlab wrote:
| > Natural language is trying to be a new programming
| language, one of many, but it's the least precise one
| imho.
|
| I disagree that natural language is trying to be a
| programming language. I disagree that being less precise
| is a flaw.
|
| Consider:
|
| - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt
|
| - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616
|
| I think we can agree these are both documents written in
| natural language. They underpin the very technology we
| are using to have this discussion. It doesn't matter to
| either of us what platform we are on, or what programming
| language was used to implement them. That is not a flaw.
|
| Biological evolution shows us how far you can get with
| "good enough". Perfection and precision are highly
| overrated.
|
| Let's imagine a wild future, one where you copy-and-paste
| the HTML spec (a natural language doc) into a coding
| agent and it writes a complete implementation of an HTML
| agent. Can you say with 100% certainty that this will not
| happen within your own lifetime?
|
| In such a world, I would prefer to be an expert in
| writing specs rather than to be an expert in implementing
| them in a particular programming language.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| In this world where the LLM implementation has a bug in
| it that impacts a human negatively (the app could
| calculate a person's credit score for example)
|
| Who is accountable?
| stillpointlab wrote:
| I couldn't even tell you who is liable _right now_ for
| bugs that impact human 's negatively. Can you? If I was
| an IC at an airplane manufacturer and a bug I wrote
| caused an airplane crash - who is legally responsible? Is
| it me? The QA team? The management team? Some 3rd party
| auditor? Some insurance underwriter? I have a strong
| suspicion it is very complicated as it is without
| considering LLMs.
|
| What I can tell you is that the last time I checked: laws
| are written in natural language, they are argued
| for/against and interpreted in natural language. I'm
| pretty confident that there is applicable precedent and
| the court system is well equipped to deal with autonomous
| systems already.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I agree with this. There's so much snake oil at the
| moment. Coding isn't the hard part of software
| development and we already have unambiguous language for
| describing computation. Human language is a bad choice
| for it, and we already find that when writing specs for
| other humans. Adding more humaness to the loop isn't a
| good thing IMHO.
|
| At best an LLM is a new UI model for data. The push to
| get them writing code is bizarre.
| nullbyte wrote:
| Looks very nice, I like the hooks feature. That's a great idea
| lacoolj wrote:
| So I'm glad there are more agentic dev tools coming out, but can
| we please stop making entirely new IDEs and start integrating as
| plugins to well-established (and some already paid for) IDEs we
| already use? Webstorm/other Jetbrains, VS Code, etc.
|
| It is a huge hassle to match my existing settings, which I've
| spent countless hours tweaking over the years, with a new editor
| that can't import them. :(
| imiric wrote:
| The obvious solution is a meta-IDE that integrates all these
| other IDEs and plugins.[1]
|
| Or, you know, stop chasing the latest trends, and use whatever
| you're most comfortable with.
|
| [1]: https://xkcd.com/927/
| williamzeng0 wrote:
| Shameless plug but our co is building a AI plugin for JetBrains
| that has next edit autocomplete + a strong coding agent (sweep
| dev)
| AstroBen wrote:
| Isn't that competing directly with JetBrains themselves?
| ManWith2Plans wrote:
| I got early access to Kiro. Wrote about my experiences here if
| you're interested: https://yehudacohen.substack.com/p/developing-
| with-kiro-amaz...
|
| It is my new daily driver.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Would appreciate a video of someone adding a feature to an
| existing project, just to get a feel for what the tool does. The
| long blog post gets lost in the sauce, would love a short 5
| minute video.
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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, your
| content, including code snippets, conversations, and file
| contents open in the IDE, unless explicitly opted out, may be
| used to enhance and improve the quality of FMs. Your content will
| not be used if you use the opt-out mechanism described in the
| documentation._ If you have an Amazon Q Developer Pro
| subscription and access Kiro through your AWS account with the
| Amazon Q Developer Pro subscription, then Kiro will not use your
| content for service improvement. For more information, see
| Service Improvement.
|
| https://kiro.dev/faq/
| srhngpr wrote:
| 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...
| m0llusk wrote:
| Is there a way to confirm this works or do we just have to
| trust that settings will be honored?
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Just like using an AI model, you _can't_ actually know for
| sure that it won't do anything malicious with what
| interfaces you give it access to. You just have to trust
| it.
| dkga wrote:
| Well, you can at least check if there is network traffic
| to AWS or something similar.
| yurishimo wrote:
| But wouldn't that look the same as actually querying the
| model? Or am I missing the joke?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There's always ways to mitigate malicious behaviour once
| it's already happening.
| pmontra wrote:
| As for everything else: trust, possibly enhanced by the
| fear of consequences for the other party.
|
| How do we know if random internet service sells our email /
| password pair? They probably store the hashed password
| because it's easier (libraries) than writing their own
| code, but they get it as cleartext every time we type it
| in.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| > How do we know if random internet service sells our
| email / password pair? They probably store the hashed
| password because it's easier (libraries) than writing
| their own code, but they get it as cleartext every time
| we type it in.
|
| For that, we can just use a unique password per service.
| That's not really a thing for code.
| rusk wrote:
| > How do we know if random internet service
|
| Audits. Obviously not every service is going to be in a
| jurisdiction that proactively audits data processors and
| controllers. Another thing to consider before you hand
| over your data.
| lukev wrote:
| 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 just the output of previous LLMs.
|
| While the utility of synthetic data proves that context
| collapse is not inevitable, it does seem to be a real
| concern... and I can say definitively based on my own
| experience that the _median_ quality of LLM-generated code is
| much worse than the _median_ quality of human-generated code.
| Especially since this would include all the code that was
| rejected during the development process.
|
| Without substantial post-processing to filter out the bad input
| code, I question how valuable the context from coding agents is
| for training data. Again, it's probably quite useful for other
| things.
| consumer451 wrote:
| There is company, maybe even a YC company, which I saw
| posting about wanting to pay people for private repos that
| died on the vine, and were never released as products. I
| believe they were asking for pre-2022 code to avoid LLM
| taint. This was to be used as training data.
|
| This is all a fuzzy memory, I could have multiple details
| wrong.
| janstice wrote:
| 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.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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.
| nicewood wrote:
| I think it's less about the code output, but about the
| process of humans iterating and adjusting the LLM-drafted
| requirements and design. Claude Code et al. are good enough,
| the bottleneck is IMO usually the context and prompt by now.
| So further improving that by optimizing for and collecting
| data about the human interaction seems like a good strategy
| to me.
|
| Essentially, the user labels (accept/edit) data (design
| documents) for the agent (amazon)
| metadat wrote:
| This is the inevitable decline where we all eventually don't
| care about the source code instructions anymore, just like the
| transition from assembly to C. Sorry in advance, I'm a privacy
| holdout too, but this isn't the interesting part of what's
| happening. I tried Kiro and it is on par with Claude or
| Crystal, nothing special at all.
|
| Within the next couple of years there's going to be a 4-for-1
| discount on software engineers. Welcome to The Matrix. You'd
| best find Morpheus.
|
| Check out the comments on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857 and tell me what
| the alternative future is. Best wishes and good luck.
| anonnon wrote:
| > 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.
| 0xEF wrote:
| 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.
| anonnon wrote:
| The well-poisoning effect is especially strong in the AI
| space based on how blatant the big players have been in
| disregarding intellectual property law and how their
| crawlers behave like DDOS bot farms.
| ezekg wrote:
| This post is downloading >100MB in gifs like it's not a thing...
| _pdp_ wrote:
| As a side note, Kiro is a diminutive of Kiril (Kiril) in Slavic-
| speaking countries and in Greek. A quick web search also reveals
| that it can mean "a curse".
| prmph wrote:
| How your comment contributes to the discussion I have no idea,
| but thanks for this factoid nonetheless.
| esafak wrote:
| We need someone to compare the efficiency of these agent
| wrappers. They may use the same models, but not as efficiently as
| one another.
| e2e4 wrote:
| https://gosuevals.com/agents.html Is quite nice, there are also
| YouTube videos that do a deeper dive
| esafak wrote:
| That table is uninformative and untrustworthy. Where is this
| detailed breakdown they speak of? How can we replicate it?
| Where is the cost? Who is behind it?
| hexo wrote:
| Thanks for accelerating global warming.
| cleverwebble wrote:
| I do like the control you have over organizing. The only thing I
| was shocked was I couldn't revert a series of changes
| (checkpointing) like you can can in Cursor. Sometimes the LLM
| does it a different way I dont like, so I want to go back and
| edit the prompt and try again.
| qwertox wrote:
| Is 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
| Amazon, why are they trying to hide that fact?
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| My original title did mention that this was an AWS product, but
| Hacker News made the editorial decision to reduce clarity.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I don't think they are trying to hide that.
|
| From the about page.
|
| > Kiro is built and operated by a small, opinionated team
| within AWS.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at AWS, different org though.
| seunosewa wrote:
| Isn't AWS Amazon Web Services??
| qwertox wrote:
| Yes, why are you asking?
| potamic wrote:
| I didn't realize either until I saw this comment. The tone of
| the blog post also felt like it was coming from an individual
| rather than an organisation, which is not typical of Amazon. I
| don't know if this was a recent acquisition, otherwise
| diverting from your primary brand is strange. Unless they feel
| an association with Amazon would only be negative.
| KomoD wrote:
| 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"
| prmph wrote:
| People are lapping up vibe coding as a way a way to avoid deep
| work, and spec-driven development is in opposition to that.
|
| Looking at the brief for this, it likely involves painstaking
| work to review and refine the specs produced. Not that there is
| anything wrong with that; as I said before in a comment on
| another story, coding assistants may reduce quite a bit of
| drudgery, but to get the best out of them you still need to do
| lots of work.
|
| The more I use agentic coding tools, the more I come to the
| realization that speccing is where you add value as an
| experienced skilled engineer. And I think this bodes well for
| software engineering, as a bifurcation emerges between the vibe
| coders (who will probably merge with the mythical end-user
| programmers) and serious engineers whose are skilled at using
| LLMs via high quality specs to create software of higher quality
| and maintainability.
|
| So the vibe coders would probably not take to this tool that
| much, but that's fine.
| sandeepkd wrote:
| Tried with one of my older projects to test it out. The problem
| statement was to upgrade the Java spring boot version from 2.7 to
| latest. I have done it in the past so exactly knew what had to be
| done there. All the requirement docs, design specs, and tasks
| look verbose and ok on high level. Interestingly I had some idea
| where the language in those docs was coming from. 1. It created
| about 40+ tasks (I have my own curated list of 5 tasks based on
| past experience)
|
| 2. At every task it tried to compile the code but failed for
| dependency errors
|
| 3. It still marked the task being complete and passed the onus of
| failures on the downstream tasks
|
| 4. Kept moving with the tasks where the original error were still
| not fixed but the tasks were being marked as done
|
| 5. After some point of time I got tired to a degree that I
| stopped reading the exact commands being executed, the fatigue of
| doing something that you are not involved in is for real 6. I
| made a naive assumption that I can sandbox it by giving
| permissions to the project folder only. It executed some CLI
| commands for java that looked simple enough in the beginning.
|
| 7. Turns out my environment variables got messed up and other
| simple things related to git, gradle stopped working
|
| Ended my experiment, reverted the code changes, fixed my
| environment
|
| Key takeaways:
|
| 1. Its giving a sense of work being executed, the quality and
| concreteness of work is hard to measure unless you have already
| done that in past. Its creating classes, tests which are not
| needed instead of focussing on the actual use case.
|
| 2. Sandboxes are MUST, there is a real risk of corruption,
| environment commands are not just simple file changes which could
| be easily reverted.
| hu3 wrote:
| Interesting. How large is the project?
| sandeepkd wrote:
| It was relatively pretty small project, about 5ish
| controllers and same number of service classes. The
| experiment lasted for about 2.5 hours where I was active for
| the first 45 minutes and then just pressing the buttons to
| move next in passive mode.
| softsales wrote:
| It's not open source. Why bother?
|
| OSS option will be there soon and will outsmart Kiro.
| honorable_coder wrote:
| Is model choice a core design consideration. Or will Kiro not let
| developers chose the underlying model?
|
| What if I want to set preferences for the underlying LLM for
| different usage scenarios? For example, for a quick and snappy
| understanding of a single file id want to use a fast model that
| doesn't cost me an arm and a leg. Recent research on preference-
| aligned LLM routing here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16655
| ghuntley wrote:
| Source 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.
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted. I appreciate this!
| zkxjzmswkwl wrote:
| I don't see anything, anything at all, that would make a
| significant percentage of Cursor users consider the switch.
|
| They can try to market grab with low %, but will find themselves
| in the boat as Cursor and eventually be forced to raise their
| prices. Except their market grab will be significantly less
| effective because they're _not_ a stand-out product. Cursor was.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Important: it's another fork of VSCode.
|
| I thought AI was ushering in the age of innovation so why is the
| only innovation anyone seems capable of copying something that
| already exists...?
|
| In all actuality, AI seems to be ushering out the age of
| innovation since people now consider it foolish to spend their
| time trying to innovate instead of clone
| daxfohl wrote:
| It does show that they're not limited to just greenfield
| projects, which is a common perspective. That said, IDK if a
| fork that is never planned to be merged back in really
| constitutes a non-greenfield project. It's more like a
| greenfield with a head start.
| hu3 wrote:
| I believe most projects use VSCode because it is hard to build
| a cross platform code editor with plugin system.
|
| And if you're going to copy, might as well be the most popular
| editor to reduce user friction.
| bhaktatejas922 wrote:
| Notably missing fast apply like Morph
| manbash wrote:
| > 2. Technical design based on requirements > Kiro then generates
| a design document by analyzing your codebase and approved spec
| requirements. It creates data flow diagrams, TypeScript
| interfaces, database schemas, and API endpoints--like the Review
| interfaces for our review system. This eliminates the lengthy
| back-and-forth on requirements clarity that typically slows
| development.
|
| This is nice for documentation but really having a design
| document after-the-fact doesn't really help much. Designing is a
| decision-making process _before_ the code is written.
| p1necone wrote:
| The Eisenhower quote comes to mind: "Plans are worthless, but
| planning is everything."
| Twirrim wrote:
| If you don't start with approximately the right destination,
| you're definitely never going to end up there, even if you
| have to take some detours and compromise on some choices.
|
| It gets really frustrating reviewing people's designs at
| times, when it's crystal clear they're a) working backwards
| and b) haven't really considered the customer experience at
| all.
|
| One of my favourite tell tale signs of a) is when the chosen
| option 100% fits the specifications, doubly so if there's no
| cons associated with the pros. Sometimes it's genuine, but
| very rarely.
| cgio wrote:
| I read it as after requirements and before code. This is how I
| would expect it to work too. It reads the existing codebase,
| which also makes sense for non greenfield projects as in the
| example.
| the_arun wrote:
| I slightly disagree. Plans are really useful for enhancements.
| If we stick to original plans & patterns as we extend & add new
| features, we can slow down the decay process.
| danbeaulieu wrote:
| Kiro takes the requirements and the existing code to create a
| spec.
|
| Otherwise the spec may cover requirements that are already met
| in the existing code and needs to understand integration points
| it needs to include in the spec.
|
| Having used Kiro myself I think it does what you expect.
| y2025 wrote:
| I'm interested!
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Is it pronounced kee roh or kai roh
| johndiv wrote:
| Really impressed with what Amazon is doing with Kiro. The
| emphasis on "spec-driven development" to get beyond "vibe coding"
| and into production-ready software is a crucial step.
| smcleod wrote:
| My 2c-TLDR; after doing some battle testing over the few weeks
| (so keep in mind some of this was on pre-release versions):
|
| The good: It's great to see they've baked in the concept of setup
| -> plan -> act into the tool with the use of specs If you're
| someone who currently only has Copilot / Q dev, this is a good
| step in the right direction - if you don't mind changing your
| IDE. I love that it has a command / task queuing system. Hooks =
| good.
|
| Goes either way: Even though it uses Q under the bonnet, it does
| seem somewhat better than Q although I think most of that is down
| to the use of plan -> act workflows
|
| The not good: There's no reason at all for it to be a VSCode fork
| and running multiple IDEs for every vendor that wants me to use
| their products is a PITA. It seems to massively over-complicate
| solutions, for things that could be quite simple even if the
| tasks are well defined it likes to create many files and go down
| very extensive and complex implementation patterns. This has to
| be something to do with the app itself as Sonnet 4 does not do
| this with Cline/Roo Code so hopefully it can be fixed (but maybe
| it suits the kind of folks that write big java apps!). It doesn't
| seem to have any integrated web browser capabilities to allow the
| model to run up and explore the app while inspecting the js
| console browser side like Cline / Roo have. My installation has
| mysteriously become 'corrupted' and needed reinstalling several
| times. There's no global rules, you have to keep a note of them
| somewhere and copy paste them into each project. GH Issue #25
|
| The bad: It's slower than Cline / Roo Code, it just takes a lot
| longer to get things done. It's very easy to hit the rate limits
| and be blocked for an undefined amount of time before you can
| continue working. There's lots of MCP bugs mainly relating to it
| still not supporting the standard streamableHTTP or SSE modes and
| breaks all MCPs without any warning or logs if you try to add
| one. GH Issue #23 The version of VSCode it's built from is quite
| out of date already, which rings alarm bells for how well such a
| large, complex application will be maintained and rolled out at
| speed over time.
| somesun wrote:
| anyone can make a comparation with cursor
|
| too many ides , hard to choose
| ryancnelson wrote:
| I wonder if it's entirely coincidental that "KIRO" is a Seattle-
| area (amazon land) television station.
| laura_rich wrote:
| Awesome!
| zorrolovsky wrote:
| Very impressed. As a programming impostor (never formally
| trained, and not working as programmer) I find the program 1)
| helped me to understand the basics of a full blown IDE dev cycle
| end to end 2) helped me to refine an app on the making. Perhaps
| the one thing that surprised me vs standard Claude is that it
| didn't ask me about the tech stack to build my app. It went
| nuclear with a complex react-based stack when my app's needs are
| less demanding (a simple html+css+js could do it)
| maoberlehner wrote:
| I have to say, I'm a little bit proud of myself that their
| approach comes close to what I consider a good method for
| building software with LLMs:
| https://markus.oberlehner.net/blog/ai-enhanced-development-b...
| duckerduck wrote:
| It seems that many in the field are converging to similar
| ideas. With AI the emphasis seems to be more on defining
| clearly _what_ to build rather than _how_. I made a similar
| experiment [1] recently where I setup "rules" between code and
| spec and have the LLM check that they are the same, I think
| similar to how Kiro uses hooks.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432215
| lastdong wrote:
| This reminds me of the pocketFlow library, which takes a
| specification document and uses it to create subtasks and
| generate code, but can be used with local models.
| larodi wrote:
| Kiretsa, bate.
| qpiox wrote:
| 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.
| baalimago wrote:
| 1000 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.
| Fokamul wrote:
| Mark my word guys, 2026 will be year of cybersecurity.
|
| Vibe coders let's gooo.
| brap wrote:
| 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 distraction. There are plenty of tools
| for that.
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| How does it compare to Claude Code? Can't that do this sort of
| thinking ahead and writing specifically? It may need some
| prompting to do the specifically writing specifically though.
|
| I feel like this might be nicer as an MCP and I bring my own AI
| assistant to it.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| What is really the benefit of this if you are stuck paying Claude
| API rates anyway?
|
| We really need a new (and cheaper!) SOTA for agentic models.
| k_kelly wrote:
| Sep 1: generate requirements, generate design, generate task list
|
| Step 2: run the tasks in claude code in parallel...
| alberth wrote:
| The ghost icon confused me at first, given ghostty use of a
| similar icon.
|
| https://ghostty.org/
| riceflippa wrote:
| they literally copied logo (even the color!) from phantom
| reactordev wrote:
| 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's this, where I feel like
| I'm a PM, not an engineer.
| Insanity wrote:
| Yeah, I hear you. Vibe coding is good for a POC style thing as
| long as you can (somewhat) ignore architecture.
|
| For any real-world application that is even slightly more
| complex than these demos it will start to fail.
|
| At least that has been my experience
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| >And in a way, as an engineer, that's what I want to be doing
| anyway...
|
| Yuk. That's pure project management.
|
| > If, in the future, PMs can launch whole features without
| engineers writing a line of code, that's awesome.
|
| No it's not! Because then, there is no incentive to engineer
| anything anymore. Just let the AI do it, Yey! Need new
| features? Let the AI do it! Need to fix your infrastructure,
| AI has your back! Has your product gotten so unwieldy that
| you have context rot and AI can't do it anymore? Pivot, throw
| it away, rebuild with AI, who needs engineers.
| daxfohl wrote:
| That's the thing though. I think we're pretty close to AI
| being able to add fairly vanilla features that fit into the
| existing architecture fairly autonomously. But I think
| we're a long way away from AI being able to do major
| refactors by itself, or even determine what needs
| refactoring and when. Maybe someday it will, and it can
| already be useful in implementing pieces of a refactor, but
| it's nowhere near close on being able to design a major
| platform shift at the moment. That's entirely a human
| domain.
|
| So while we're in the middle of those two pivot points, I
| think most of our work will be on the architecture side.
| Continuously clean up the platform so the LLM agents can
| keep humming along on it.
|
| Eventually we'll perhaps get to the point where AI can
| automate 100% of this as well, and I have no clue what will
| become of engineers then. But I don't see that happening in
| the next ten years, and even when it does happen, I'm sure
| the changes will create whole new industries, workflows,
| and sets of problems for human engineers to solve. (SciFi
| me expects a whole new field of extracting the most value
| out of AI without letting it run amock. As fast as it goes,
| and as intelligent as it will be, we won't be able to just
| let it take over. We'll need to design guardrails for it so
| that it does the things you want, and doesn't make
| decisions that you don't want. This, by definition, has to
| be a human driven process. So I think there'll be work for
| human engineers to do for a long long time.)
| elashri wrote:
| It is strange that Amazon Q extension is incompatible with kiro
| right now.
| UrineSqueegee wrote:
| do i have to run each task manually in the tasks.md? can i not
| leave it unsupervised?
|
| i also need to individually approve each command for some reason
| and then if it fails due to a service high load i need to
| manually restart all over again the same task.
| harryf wrote:
| > fails due to a service high load
|
| It seems to be suffering the HN effect right now. Earlier it
| was working nicely and pretty much doing everything in the
| background
| adonese wrote:
| Sonnet 4 seems like the sweet spot for every ai provider now. I
| wonder why oai couldn't match it
| willsmith72 wrote:
| first impressions:
|
| 1. autopilot should be off by default. this is the norm for
| claude code and cline (plan mode)
|
| 2. my sidebar is on the right. that was imported correctly from
| vs code, but the kiro window is still on the left. why can't it
| be on the same side as my sidebar like a usual extension (e.g.
| cline)?
|
| 3. the textbox is super busy. for some reason the "Hold Shift to
| drop image" is stuck there
| stuaxo wrote:
| Vscode again.
|
| If MS didn't have their weird semi closed ecosystem for Vscode
| this would be in Vscode proper.
| lucasfdacunha wrote:
| It seems that it doesn't work with WSL 2 yet. Any plans to
| support it?
| akdev1l wrote:
| 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
| brandnewideas wrote:
| You're using a slop tool and expect it to produce anything but
| slop?
| helsinki wrote:
| Trash
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I know Cursor seems to work best using Anthropic's models, is
| this similar or does it use a model from Amazon?
| brandnewideas wrote:
| Slop.
| bcheung wrote:
| 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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