Kiro

Amazon Web Services launched Kiro in July 2025, an agentic IDE built on Code OSS, the open-source foundation of Visual Studio Code, and driven by Claude Sonnet 4.0 and 3.7. Its method is spec coding: requirements decomposition, then technical design generation, then task implementation, with a hooks system that fires test updates, documentation refreshes and security scans when a file is saved or modified. AWS presented it as standalone and cloud-agnostic, where Amazon Q Developer is bound tightly to AWS cloud services, and priced it by usage: 50 agentic interactions per month on the free tier, $19 for 1000, $39 for 3000. The launch put AWS against Cursor and Windsurf.

Kate Holterhoff noted in September 2025 that Kiro also carries a Vibe mode, in which agents generate code and infrastructure from few instructions. Days later, Anirban Ghoshal reported that Cursor, Claude Code and Kiro had all settled at higher prices. Dion Hinchcliffe of The Futurum Group traced the increases to GPU supply pressure, model licensing costs and infrastructure overhead.

In April 2026, Julien Lépine, CTO of AWS France, described Kiro as the internal standard for roughly 30,000 AWS developers, an IDE and CLI on Claude Sonnet/Opus announced by Matt Garman at re:Invent, supported by a 30,000-member Slack channel and shared ADRs. The rebuild of Amazon Bedrock, estimated by Anthony Ligori at 30 developers and 18 months, was delivered by 6 people in 72 days, with the code entirely generated by AI, largely reviewed, and no vibe coding because the platform is critical production.