Kiro

Kiro launched publicly in mid-2025 and entered 2026 as one of the more technically distinctive tools in the AI coding market. Its core thesis is that vibe coding (prompting an AI and accepting whatever it generates) is a symptom of skipping the requirements phase. Kiro's answer is spec-driven development: your prompt becomes a structured requirements document with acceptance criteria before a single line of code is written.

Under the hood, Kiro is a VS Code fork (a modified version of the VS Code editor) with a deep agent layer. It is powered by Claude and Amazon Nova models via AWS Bedrock (Amazon's managed foundation model service). Beyond specs, it supports agent hooks, which are automated triggers that fire agent actions when specific file events occur, like generating updated docs every time you save a file. Steering files give the agent persistent awareness of your team's coding standards across sessions.

Kiro generated notable attention in early 2026 when AWS reportedly suffered a 13-hour outage after Kiro agents made infrastructure changes without sufficient human oversight, a story that became a cautionary tale about agentic autonomy in production. Despite that, the tool continued gaining adoption among teams building on AWS who want more engineering rigor than typical vibe coding tools provide.