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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

(kiro.dev)
1013 points QuinnyPig | 5 comments | 14 Jul 25 14:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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postalcoder ◴[14 Jul 25 15:54 UTC] No.44561643[source]▶
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.

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NathanKP ◴[14 Jul 25 16:01 UTC] No.44561729[source]▶
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.

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1. adastra22 ◴[14 Jul 25 19:11 UTC] No.44564116[source]▶
“I really don’t want to do X”

“Kirk is actually quite good at this: you just have to do X”

“…”

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2. NathanKP ◴[14 Jul 25 19:41 UTC] No.44564421[source]▶
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.

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3. adastra22 ◴[14 Jul 25 20:41 UTC] No.44564997[source]▶
And then you have two separate specifications of your intent, with the ongoing problems that causes. It’s not the same thing.
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4. NathanKP ◴[14 Jul 25 20:56 UTC] No.44565166{3}[source]▶
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.

5. helpfulContrib ◴[14 Jul 25 21:00 UTC] No.44565230{3}[source]▶
Porting rules is one of the responsibilities of keeping them.