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

While I like the product, implementation could be better. Kiro is sitting idle with Helper Plugin using a shitload of CPU for no reason.

A few things:

1) It's normal for Kiro (and almost every AI editor) to use a lot more CPU when you first start it up, because it is indexing your codebase in the background, for faster and more accurate results when you prompt. That indexing should complete at some point

2) On initial setup of Kiro it will import and install your plugins from VS Code. If you have a large number of plugins this continues in the background, and can be quite CPU heavy as it extracts and runs the installs for each plugin. This is a one time performance hit though.

3) If your computer is truly idle, most modern CPU's get throttled back to save power. When the CPU is throttled, even a tiny amount of CPU utilization can show up as a large percentage of the CPU, but that's just because the CPU has been throttled back to a very slow clock speed.

In my setup (minimal plugins, medium sized codebase, computer set to never idle the processor clock) I rarely see Kiro helper go above .4% CPU utilization, so if you are seeing high CPU it is likely for one of the above reasons.

Thanks for the reply. It was the indexing.

Is there any way to control this? I have my files.watcherExclude setting, does it respect that?

I believe that the file indexing exclusion is based on .gitignore, not files.watcherExclude, but let me check on that and confirm.

I tried with a small project, it worked fine, no high CPU usage.

However with a large project, it seems that it indexed, then dropped CPU, then I started opening up files and working with them, then the CPU spiked again.

I'll look into this. Kiro is supposed to be doing progressive reindexing. When you make a change it should only have to reindex the files that changed. If you have any logs or other data you are willing to share, to help the team investigate you can use the "report a bug / suggest an idea" link at the bottom, or open an issue at: https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro/issues