What I like about OpenAI's codex is that it's not an IDE but a web based product that does things asynchronously from your normal workflow. It creates branches and pull requests. And you can iterate with it via git instead of working in the same tool.
So, I can use the tools I use anyway and have AIs adapt to me instead of me having to adapt to new AI powered tools. I'm using a proper IDE (intellij). Me switching to cursor, kiro, or whatever would be an enormously massive downgrade for me. These tools don't come close to the utility and features of what I am used to and depend on. And those new AI tools trying to catch up with Intellij is not their focus or roadmap. I'm not going to wait for that to happen. I need stuff that works now. Not some years after they figure it out. And that includes AI features.
There's a difference between vibe coding where you are sitting on your hands and admiring all the crazy clever stuff the AI does for you that you wouldn't be able to do yourself and working on a system that you've spent years building from scratch with AI to assist you. I do the latter. I'm constantly intervening, dismissing poor results from AI, getting frustrated with LLMs misunderstanding things, ignoring my directions, not getting the full context, etc. But I'm also getting a lot of value out of AIS with dealing with tedious/repetitive stuff, figuring out weird bugs, pointing out my mistakes, or generating perfectly usable solutions for TODOs and FIXMEs I leave in my code. About 50-60% of the PRs codex creates for me are pretty usable.
I use ChatGPT for the small stuff (it can look at intellij and apply diffs) and codex for the bigger stuff "implement foo, add some tests, and tell me when I can look at the PR". And maybe I'll check out the branch and fix a few things myself. That's something my IDE supports very well. It's not a big deal. It doesn't need to be fixed.
I find that increasingly, model quality is not the main blocker for this stuff but the developer/user experience is. Claude might be better. But chat gpt has the far better UX. And I don't even use o3 most of the time. I prefer the more rapid responses other faster models give me. It's not a cost thing but a speed thing. I only escalate to slower models when I don't like the response I'm getting. Codex is nice but slooooooow. But at least I can work on other stuff while it is doing its thing. ChatGPT gives me instant gratification. Select line, Option+shift+1, "Fix this", "....", "apply fix". That's so nice and I do that a lot. And I didn't have to replace my tools. In the same way, Claude code might be marginally better at some stuff. But the Codex developer experience is superior.
So, Kiro sounds like a nice tool for people who don't need or use IDEs. But it's not for me.