Kiro: A new agentic IDE

I love all of this experimentation in how to effectively use AIs to co-create output with human steering. This pattern, of the human human focusing on the high-level and the AI focusing on the low level feels like a big win.

In some sense, we are starting with a very high-level and gradually refining the idea to a lower and lower levels of detail. It is structured hierarchical thinking. Right now we are at 3 levels: requirement -> spec -> code. Exposing each of these layers as structured text documents (mostly Markdown right now it seems) is powerful since each level can be independently reviewed. You can review the spec before the code is written, then review the code before it gets checked in.

My intuition is that this pattern will be highly effective for coding. And if we prove that out at scale, we should start asking: how does this pattern translate to other activities? How will this affect law, medicine, insurance, etc. Software is the tip of the iceberg and if this works then there are many possible avenues to expand this approach, and many potential startups to serve a growing market.

The key will be managing all of the documents, the levels of abstraction and the review processes. This is a totally tractable problem.

> Exposing each of these layers as structured text documents

If we take it far enough, we could end up with a well structured syntax with a defined vocabulary for specifying what the computer should do that is rigorously followed in the implemented code. You could think of it as some kind of a ... language for .... programming the computer. Mind blowing.

I get you are being sarcastic, but lets actually consider your idea more broadly.

- Machine code

- Assembly code

- LLVM

- C code (high level)

- VM IR (byte code)

- VHLL (e.g. Python/Javascript/etc)

So, we already have hierarchical stacks of structured text. The fact that we are extending this to higher tiers is in some sense inevitable. Instead of snark, we could genuinely explore this phenomenon.

LLMs are allowing us to extend this pattern to domains other than specifying instructions to processors.

And we re-invent the wheel basically. You have to use very specific prompts to make the computer do what you want, so why not just, you know... program it? It's not that hard.

Natural language is trying to be a new programming language, one of many, but it's the least precise one imho.

I agree with this. There's so much snake oil at the moment. Coding isn't the hard part of software development and we already have unambiguous language for describing computation. Human language is a bad choice for it, and we already find that when writing specs for other humans. Adding more humaness to the loop isn't a good thing IMHO.

At best an LLM is a new UI model for data. The push to get them writing code is bizarre.