Kiro

What Kiro is

Kiro is an agentic IDE: an integrated development environment in which an AI agent does a substantial share of the work. Its makers present it as a way to take a developer from prototype to production through spec-driven development ^[1]. Amazon Web Services is listed as its parent organization ^[2]. The product was announced on 14 July 2025 in a post titled "Introducing Kiro", written by Nikhil Swaminathan and Deepak Singh ^[1].

From prompt to spec

Work starts with a single prompt. From it, Kiro generates user stories, and each story carries acceptance criteria written in EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation — a fixed sentence pattern for stating requirements so that they read unambiguously ^[1]. The stories then form a spec.

A spec is an artifact meant to be thought through in depth, and it is the spec, rather than the original prompt, that steers the agent toward a better implementation ^[1]. That ordering changes where the human spends attention: instead of judging a finished change, the developer argues over a written statement of what the feature should do, while it is still cheap to alter.

Design and tasks

Once a spec is approved, Kiro analyses the codebase and the spec together and produces a design document. That document covers data flow diagrams, TypeScript interfaces, database schemas and API endpoints ^[1].

From the design, Kiro generates tasks and sub-tasks, sequences them by dependency, and links each one back to a requirement, so that a piece of work can be traced to the requirement it serves ^[1]. Requirement, design, task: this is the ordinary shape of a software project plan. What is unusual is that the first draft of each artifact is produced by the tool, and that the artifacts stay in the tool rather than in a separate planning document.

Hooks

Kiro hooks are event-driven automations: they trigger an agent to run a task when files are saved, created or deleted, or on a manual trigger ^[1]. In other words, the agent can be wired to the routine events of a codebase instead of only being summoned by a chat message.

Availability

Kiro was free during its preview period, with some limits ^[1]. Access at launch ran through a waitlist ^[1]. It supports macOS, Windows and Linux, and most popular programming languages ^[1]. The announcement therefore described a product still in preview, with entry controlled rather than open.

Where it sits

Kiro belongs to a class of coding tools that put an agent, rather than line-by-line completion, at the centre. Its distinguishing choice is to make written specifications the control surface: the developer approves a spec and a design before implementation work proceeds ^[1]. The same information is also what the generated tasks point back to, so the trail from a requirement to the work done for it stays visible inside the environment ^[1]. Review in this arrangement happens at the point where requirements and interfaces are decided, not only at the diff.