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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

(kiro.dev)
1013 points QuinnyPig | 1 comments | 14 Jul 25 14:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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NathanKP ◴[14 Jul 25 15:03 UTC] No.44561071[source]▶
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

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clbrmbr ◴[14 Jul 25 15:44 UTC] No.44561505[source]▶
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?

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1. NathanKP ◴[14 Jul 25 15:59 UTC] No.44561696[source]▶
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.