Kiro: A new agentic IDE

Here my problem with this: I don't want to be jumping an editor/IDE every 6 months, learning new key bindings and even more importantly, getting used to a completely new look.

In a space that moves as quickly as "AI" does, it is inevitable that a better and cheaper solution will pop up at some point. We kinda already see it with Cursor and Windsurf. I guess Claude Code is all the rage now and I personally think CLI/TUI is the way to go for anyone that has a similar view.

That said, I'm sure there's a very big user base (probably bigger than terminal group) that will enjoy using this and other GUI apps.

They're all based vscode, so the switching costs are fairly minimal? It'll get worse over time as they diverge, but at the moment they're all fairly similar AFAICT. It's starting to become noticeable that Cursor isn't picking up VSCode enhancements and fixes, but it's still quite minor.

only if you use vscode, I think TUIs are a better option since a lot of us use other ides than vscode

Seems like Amazon started making this when Cursor was hot in the market, but now that CLI agents like Claude Code are taking over, Kiro will have an uphill battle.

It’s also not free or unlimited (though throttled) like Cursor and Claude Code using max plan.

Which is kind of ironic since the Amazon Q Developer CLI (which is essentially Claude Code with a slightly different wrapper) was released long before Claude Code and seems to mostly be flying under the radar.

Claude Code is what it is because of Claude, TUI or not isn't really the point. What makes IDEs lose to TUIs is that the agentic models can really do more than coding and is evolving toward a hands-off kind of workflow. A clunky IDE is too much for that, but TUI is not the way either. When has TUI ever been mainstream?

Agentic tools of the future will be rich notebook/chat interface that's available in all form factors, which is to say, most likely web/cross platform apps.

You can have an agent loop in your IDE, I don't see why anything makes "IDEs lose to TUIs" there.

If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every step one at a time.

I hate trying to copy paste in/out of Claude Code's unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.

Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.

https://zed.dev/docs/ai/agent-panel