AWS launched Kiro on July 15, 2025 as an AI-native IDE designed to address a specific criticism of “vibe coding” tools: that they generated code without engineering discipline, producing software that worked initially but became difficult to maintain. Kiro’s response was spec-driven development — before writing a single line of code, the agent researched the request, generated formal requirements documents, proposed a system design, and broke the work into an implementation task list for human review.
Powered by Claude Sonnet 4 via Amazon Bedrock and running in isolated Cloud VMs for safe execution, Kiro added engineering rigour that caught ambiguities before they became bugs. Approving the spec committed to the approach before the agent proceeded to implementation — a natural human review checkpoint.
Kiro attracted 250,000 developers during its public preview and launched domain-specific “Kiro Powers” extensions in partnership with Stripe, Figma, Datadog, Neon, and Netlify. The availability of a standalone IDE, a web service, and a CLI tool gave developers multiple entry points. Kiro represented AWS’s first major entry into the agentic IDE market, competing directly with Cursor and Windsurf.