Kiro: A new agentic IDE

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

Why build an editor and not a CLI. VS code is really slow for me and I would have preferred a CLI.

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

> 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...)