AWS Launches Kiro: AI Coding Platform Exits Preview with Structured Development Approach

Amazon's surprise indie hit: Kiro launches broadly in bid to reshape AI-powered software development

Can the software development hero conquer the "AI Slop Monster" to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos? That was the storyline unfolding inside a darkened studio at Seattle Center last week, as Amazon's Kiro software development system was brought to life for a promotional video. Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle's Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence. In this tiny dramatic scene, Kiro's ghost mascot played the role that the product aims to fill in real life -- a stabilizing force that brings structure and clarity to AI-assisted software development. No, this is not your typical Amazon Web Services product launch. Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon's effort to rethink how developers use AI. It's an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding, the increasingly popular technique that creates working apps and websites from natural language prompts. But rather than simply generating code from prompts, Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable. It's part of Amazon's push into AI-powered software development, expanding beyond its AWS Code Whisperer tool to compete more aggressively against rivals such as Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini Code Assist, and open-source AI coding assistants. The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024. A July 2025 report from Market.us projects the AI code assistant market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2024 to $47.3 billion by 2034. Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months. The internet is "full of prototypes that were built with AI," said Deepak Singh, Amazon's vice president of developer agents and experiences, in an interview last week. The problem, he explained, is that if a developer returns to that code two months later, or hands it to a teammate, "they have absolutely no idea what prompts led to that. It's gone." Kiro solves that problem by offering two distinct modes of working. In addition to "vibe mode," where they can quickly prototype an idea, Kiro has a more structured "spec mode," with formal specifications, design documents, and task lists that capture what the software is meant to do. Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies. 'Very different and intentional approach' As a product of Amazon's cloud division, Kiro is unusual in that it's relevant well beyond the world of AWS. It works across languages, frameworks, and deployment environments. Developers can build in JavaScript, Python, Go, or other languages and run applications anywhere -- on AWS, other cloud platforms, on-premises, or locally. That flexibility and broader reach are key reasons Amazon gave Kiro a standalone brand rather than presenting it under the AWS or Amazon umbrella. It was a "very different and intentional approach," said Julia White, AWS chief marketing officer, in an interview at the video shoot. The idea was to defy the assumptions that come with the AWS name, including the idea that Amazon's tools are built primarily for its own cloud. White, a former Microsoft and SAP executive who joined AWS as chief marketing officer a year ago, has been working on the division's fundamental brand strategy and calls Kiro a "wonderful test bed for how far we can push it." She said those lessons are starting to surface elsewhere across AWS as the organization looks to "get back to that core of our soul." With developers, White said, "you have to be incredibly authentic, you need to be interesting. You need to have a point of view, and you can never be boring." That philosophy led to the fun, quirky, and irreverent approach behind Kiro's ghost mascot and independent branding. The marketing strategy for Kiro caused some internal hesitation, White recalled. People inside the company wondered whether they could really push things that far. Her answer was emphatic: "Yep, yep, we can. Let's do it." Amazon's Kiro has caused a minor stir in Seattle media circles, where the KIRO radio and TV stations, pronounced like Cairo, have used the same four letters stretching back into the last century. People at the stations were not exactly thrilled by Amazon's naming choice. Early user adoption With its core audience of developers, however, the product has struck a nerve in a positive way. During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company. Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro's spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they're seeing from adopting the tool. Kiro uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly credits: a free plan with 50 credits, a Pro plan at $20 per user per month with 1,000 credits, a Pro+ plan at $40 with 2,000 credits, and a Power tier at $200 with 10,000 credits, each with pay-per-use overages. With the move to general availability, Amazon says teams can now manage Kiro centrally through AWS IAM Identity Center, and startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year's worth of Kiro credits. New features include property-based testing -- a way to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified -- and a new command-line interface in the terminal, the text-based workspace many programmers use to run and test their code. A new checkpointing system lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent's steps when an idea goes sideways, serving as a practical safeguard for AI-assisted coding. Amit Patel, director of software engineering for Kiro, said the team itself is deliberately small -- a classic Amazon "two-pizza team." And yes, they've been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster. Patel pointed to a complex cross-platform notification feature that had been estimated to take four weeks of research and development. Using Kiro, one engineer prototyped it the next day and shipped the production-ready version in a day and a half. Patel said this reflects the larger acceleration of software development in recent years. "The amount of change," he said, "has been more than I've experienced in the last three decades."

In a sea of agents, AWS bets on structured adherence and spec fidelity

Despite new methods emerging, enterprises continue to turn to autonomous coding agents and code generation platforms. The competition to keep developers working on their platforms, coming from tech companies, has also heated up. AWS thinks its offering, Kiro, and new capabilities to ensure behavioral adherence set up a large differentiator in the increasingly crowded coding agent space. Kiro, first launched in July on public preview, is now generally available with new features, including property-based testing for behavior and a command-line interface (CLI) capability to tailor custom agents. Deepak Singh, AWS vice president for databases and AI, told VentureBeat in an interview that Kiro "keeps the fun" of coding while providing it structure. "The way I like to say it is, what Kiro does is it allows you to talk to your agent and work with your agent to build software just like you would do with any other agent," Singh said. "But what Kiro does is it brings this structured way of writing that software, which we call spectrum and development, to specs that take your ideas, converts them into things that will endure over time. So the outcome is more robust, maintainable code." Kiro is an agentic coding tool built into developer IDEs to help create agents and applications from prototype to production. In addition to new features, AWS is offering startups in most countries one year of free credits to Kiro Pro+ and expanded access to Teams. Behavioral adherence and checkpointing built in One of the new features of Kiro is property-based testing and checkpointing. A problem some enterprises face with AI-generated code is that it can sometimes be difficult to judge accuracy and how closely the agents adhere to their intended purpose. AWS noted in a blog post that "whoever writes the tests (human or AI) is limited by their own biases -- they have to think of all the different, specific scenarios to test the code against, and they'll miss edge cases they didn't think of. AI models often 'game' the solution by modifying tests instead of fixing code." "What property-based testing does is it takes a specification, it takes a spec, and from that, it identifies properties your code should have, and it basically creates potentially hundreds of testing scenarios to verify that your code is doing what you intended it to as identified in the spec, and it does all the automatically," Singh said. Singh said that organizations can upload their specifications, and the Kiro agent can start identifying what is missing, even before the code review process begins. Property-based testing matches the specified behavior, aka your instructions, to what the code is doing. Kiro can help users write it in their specifications based on the EARS format. For example, if a company is building a car sales app, the specification would read: "For any user and any car listing, WHEN the user adds the car to favorites, THE System SHALL display that car in their favorites list. PBT then automatically tests this with User A adding Car #1, User B adding Car #500, User C adding multiple cars, users with special characters in usernames, cars with various statuses (new, used, certified), and hundreds more combinations, catching edge cases and verifying that implementation matches your intent." As opposed to a traditional unit test specification, which states: If a user adds car #5 to their favorites, then it will appear on their list. Kiro will then identify examples of the code violating the specifications and present them to the user. Kiro also now allows for checkpointing, so developers can go back to a previous change if something goes wrong. CLI coding The second major new feature of Kiro is Kiro CLI, which brings the Kiro coding agent directly into a developer's CLI. AWS said the Kiro CLI utilizes some functionalities from the Q Developer CLI -- its in-line coding assistant, launched in October 2024 -- to enable users to access the agent from the command line. It also allows developers to start building custom agents, such as a backend specialist, a frontend agent, and a DevOps agent, tailored to an organization's codebase. Singh said developers have their own unique ways of working, so it's important for coding agent providers like AWS to meet them, where they are. Kiro CLI allows users to: * Stay in the terminal without the need for context switching * Structuring AI workflows with custom agents * Have one set up for two environments since MCP servers and other tools work in both the Kiro version on the IDE or the CLI * Fast automation to format code or manage logs through automated commands Coding agents competition Kiro, though, is just one of many coding agent platforms cropping up and competing for enterprise usage. From OpenAI's GPT-Codex, which unifies its Codex coding assistant with IDEs, CLIs, and other workflows, to Google's Gemini CLI, it's clear that more developers demand easy access to coding agents where they do their work. And enterprises are demanding more from coding agents. For example, Anthropic made its Claude Code platform available on the web and mobile. Some coding platforms also allow users to choose which model to use for their coding. Singh said Kiro doesn't rely on just one LLM; instead, it routes to the best model for the work, including AWS models. At launch in July, Kiro was based on Claude Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0. Well-known brands like Monday.com have noted the significant benefits of AI-powered coding, demonstrating that enterprises will likely continue to utilize these platforms in the future. "We saw that the mental model changes for developers, but it's not just about becoming more efficient; it's also how they organize around the way they work now," Singh said.

Indian Startups Can Now Vibe Code With AWS Kiro | AIM

AWS wants Kiro to be a tool every developer can use without requiring a backend or cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Kiro, its vibe coding platform, introducing new capabilities across the IDE, terminal, and enterprise management. The company said Kiro now supports property-based testing (PBT), checkpointing, multi-root workspaces, and a new command-line interface that brings Kiro agents directly into developers' terminals. Amazon said that since Kiro's preview launch in July, developers have adopted Specs as a structured way to build with AI. Speaking with AIM, Massimo Re Ferre, director of product management at AWS for Kiro, revealed that Kiro IDE has been shaped heavily by developer feedback collected since its tech preview launch, which saw more than 100,000 users sign up within just the first three days.&nbs

AWS launches Kiro Code into general availability with team features and CLI support - SiliconANGLE

AWS launches Kiro Code into general availability with team features and CLI support Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Kiro Code, a new development environment integrated with artificial intelligence agents that's designed to assist with rapidly building software with natural language prompts. Kiro sets itself apart from other "vibe coding" options on the market, such as Cursor and Windsurf, by first producing a "spec," or specifications, from the prompt given by the user. Included in these specifications, Kiro generates clear requirements, structured designs and test validated implementation tasks before getting to work. According to Amazon, this makes Kiro one of the few agentic coding apps that inherently includes industry best practices in specification planning for software development. In addition to the software's general availability, Amazon announced that Kiro is being launched with team support. Software development teams can now sign up with AWS IAM Identity Center, with support for more identity providers coming soon. Admins can manage access, where they can assign subscriptions and turn on overages, monitor costs, set up and control AI tool connectivity, and manage a single bill. Teams can collaborate on steering files, a method for providing Kiro direction and persistent knowledge about the working environment. Instead of explaining organization coding conventions and personal preferences in every chat, steering files give Kiro a consistent understanding of how to follow established patterns, libraries and standards. They're stored as easy-to-read markdown files written in natural language, just like any other prompt. Users can produce steering files that are specific to them, an individual project or team-wide. This enables different layers of personal customization to Kiro's behavior coupled with additional methods to align with team needs. Amazon introduced a new integrated development environment, the editing and development software that allows users to view, change and deploy code. The new IDE comes with three new capabilities including property-based tests to measure generated code against the specification, checkpointing allowing developers to "rewind" agent-made modifications and support for multiple base folders. The company also debuted a command-line interface capability with Kiro CLI. This new offering brings Kiro into the terminal, a line-by-line, text-based way to interact with the development agents. Unlike graphical user interfaces, which rely on visual elements such as icons and menus, a CLI involves typing commands sequentially and receiving text output in a window. CLIs are highly efficient for advanced users who don't need the bells and whistles of a fully visual development environment. Working through a terminal also provides a direct way of communicating with the operating system and software -- for example, installing necessary components without the need for a mouse. Google LLC took a similar step earlier this year with the debut of Gemini CLI in June, which brought its AI agent into the developer terminal to streamline coding tasks. The release signaled a broader industry effort to make AI agents accessible from within core developer workflows. Anthropic has since expanded the market with upgrades to Claude Code, while OpenAI advanced its own tooling with updates to the coding-optimized Codex CLI. Amazon unveiled Kiro Code in preview during July for download on Apple macOS, Windows and Linux. A free option is available, with subscriptions beginning at $20 per month for Kiro Pro, $40 for Kiro Pro+, and $200 for Kiro Power, each offering successively more AI generation credits. Alongside today's general availability announcement, Amazon said startups in most countries may apply to receive one year of free Kiro credits to build their projects.