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Now generally available, AWS’ Kiro is an agentic IDE that enables organizations to move beyond “vibe coding” to structured development that produces production-grade code.
AWS initially released Kiro in preview last July and made it generally available yesterday. Since July, the company added several new capabilities, including remote Model Context Protocol (MCP), global steering files, dev server support, an Auto agent, and making specs more flexible with optional tasks, wrote Nikhil Swaminathan, product lead for Kiro IDE, and Dragos Ilinca, product marketing lead for AWS agentic AI developer tools, in a blog post.
“We are bringing rigorous software development methodologies to agentic development, and that will result in much higher quality code and much higher productivity for developers,” Amit Patel, director of software development for Kiro at AWS, told The New Stack.
“Unlike a lot of existing tools that are out there, one of the things we did back in July when we launched, we introduced this new idea of spec-driven development, and the reason we wanted to add that into the toolkit for developers was that vibe coding has some limitations, especially when it comes to building production-mode software,” he said.
“Spec-driven development means writing a ‘spec’ before writing code with AI (‘documentation first’). The spec becomes the source of truth for the human and the AI,” wrote Birgitta Böckeler, a distinguished engineer and AI-assisted delivery expert at Thoughtworks, in a blog post.
“We were the first to bring spec-driven development to AI coding tools, and the broader industry has recognized its value — planning is the right way to do work with AI agents,” the AWS blog says.
The new version of the Kiro IDE comes with new capabilities, including property-based testing that helps developers make sure their code behaves as intended and checkpointing so developers can go back to a previous change in the agent execution flow.
AWS also added several new capabilities, including:
Property-based testing (PBT) measures “whether your code matches the behavior you defined in your Spec. Instead of testing specific examples, Kiro goes into your project’s specifications and extracts properties that represent how the system should generally behave, then tests against them,” the AWS blog said.
Patel said property-based testing validates the correctness of specifications before code generation. It also catches contradictions and inconsistencies in requirements early.
Patel added that PBT is more robust than unit testing as it uses mathematical methods to measure correctness. The PBT capability is being developed with AWS’s Automated Reasoning Group, Patel said. It helps avoid the confusion where AI agents can’t tell if test failures are due to bad tests or bad code, he said.
Kiro will add automated reasoning to catch specification errors before code generation, aiming to deliver production-ready applications faster than competitors focused on rapid prototyping, Patel said.
AWS officials said more than 100,000 developers used Kiro in its first five days of preview, and in three months, more than 250,000 developers are using it.
And since its preview launch, Kiro has received nearly 300 million requests from developers. In addition, since the preview launch, Kiro has processed trillions of tokens to bring structure to AI coding, with capabilities like specs, hooks and steering, the company said.
In addition to a new version of Kiro IDE, AWS also released Kiro CLI, a new, terminal-based agentic development experience. In the CLI, developers will also be able to tailor custom agents — agents optimized for specific tasks to help them build.
“The Kiro agent is now available in your terminal. Use the CLI to build features, automate workflows in seconds, analyze errors, trace bugs, and suggest fixes — all in a terminal of your choice, in a highly interactive loop that keeps you in flow,” the AWS blog said. “Kiro CLI works with the same steering files and MCP settings you set up in the Kiro IDE so you and your team have access to the same tools and preferences across both environments.”
Meanwhile, Patel said teams in organizations of all sizes, not just individual developers, can now use Kiro.
“Kiro now supports working across multiple project roots simultaneously,” the AWS post said. “Teams with multiple git submodules or multiple packages in a single project can now work with the AI agent across all of them.”
Several companies have used Kiro in preview, including Rackspace Technology, which used Kiro for their modernization efforts and completed 52 weeks of estimated work in just three weeks — a 90% increase in efficiency.
“Kiro provides a much more structured way for developers to work on large and complex projects, work on improving large existing codebases and add features or build new capabilities, which could be multiday or multiweek efforts, and that spec-driven development approach has actually made some of the limitations of vibe coding like managing context over a multiday interaction with the agent — the experience is much better, and the quality of the code that’s output is much greater,” Patel said.
Socure, a digital identity verification and fraud prevention company, used Kiro’s spec-driven development to complete a three-week migration project from Scala to Go in just two days.
Voxelis, an AI startup for helicopter wildfire suppression, said it prefers Kiro over its previous design tools for UI design and planning for its aviation software development. Other businesses that have used Kiro include SmugMug, Hughes Network Systems, Brex, Motorway and more, AWS said.
AWS also introduced a startup offer where the company is giving away one year’s worth of Kiro Pro+ for qualifying startups. Available globally to eligible startups up to Series B, the offer is available until Dec. 31, 2025, while credit supplies last. Existing AWS Activate credits can now be used for Kiro, and both offers stack.
