The market for AI tools aimed at developers has become one of the most fiercely competitive areas in the tech industry. Major players include Big Tech giants like Google and Microsoft, rapidly growing AI startups such as Cursor and OpenAI, and many others.
Today, another Big Tech giant, Amazon, has entered the race with the launch of Kiro—an AI-powered agentic IDE built on top of Code OSS (a VSCode fork). According to Amazon, Kiro can help turn prototypes into production-ready systems, thanks to distinctive features like specs and hooks.
Kiro introduces two key features to enhance developer productivity: Kiro Specs and Kiro Hooks. Specs allow developers to embed requirement specifications directly within the IDE, giving AI agents richer context to produce better implementations. Hooks, on the other hand, are event-driven automations that trigger AI tasks in the background when developers perform actions like saving, creating, or deleting files—or when manually triggered.
Kiro can automatically generate design documents based on the existing codebase and approved specifications. It can also produce data flow diagrams, TypeScript interfaces, database schemas, and API endpoints.
While working on a project, developers can initiate tasks via Kiro’s new task interface. As tasks complete, Kiro displays inline status updates and provides tools for reviewing results, such as code diffs and agent execution history.
Beyond its unique capabilities, Kiro includes all the standard features you"d expect from an AI-powered code editor: support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the ability to define custom rules that guide AI behavior across the project, and a chat-based UI for ad-hoc coding support.
Since Kiro is built on Microsoft-backed Code OSS, it also supports importing existing VS Code settings and Open VSX-compatible plugins.
You can download Kiro here. It’s free to use during the preview period and comes with generous usage limits. Once the preview ends, Kiro will offer Free, Pro, and Pro+ plans, each with different levels of usage allowances.