Kiro: A new agentic IDE

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.

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.

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.

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.