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Kiro: A new agentic IDE

(kiro.dev)
1015 points QuinnyPig | 3 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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ActorNightly ◴[14 Jul 25 17:30 UTC] No.44562880[source]▶
While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for no reason.
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slacktivism123 ◴[14 Jul 25 17:40 UTC] No.44562994[source]▶
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.
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1. rcleveng ◴[14 Jul 25 21:06 UTC] No.44565300[source]▶
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 :)

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2. dgfitz ◴[15 Jul 25 00:51 UTC] No.44566857[source]▶
> 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.

3. ActorNightly ◴[15 Jul 25 18:39 UTC] No.44574446[source]▶
>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.