Kiro is an AI coding agent from Amazon Web Services, announced in July 2025. Its defining idea is spec-driven development: instead of jumping straight from a prompt to code, Kiro first writes a requirements document, a technical design and an ordered task list, which the developer can review and edit before agents implement them. It runs as a VS Code-style IDE, a CLI, a web app with cloud sandboxes and a mobile app, with steering files that keep project conventions consistent across all of them.
Pricing is credit-based (see kiro.dev/pricing): a free tier with 50 monthly credits, then Pro at $20, Pro+ at $40, Pro Max at $100 and Power at $200 per user per month, with extra credits at $0.04. Different models consume credits at different rates, which makes monthly costs harder to predict than a flat seat price. AWS is steering Amazon Q Developer users toward Kiro.
The trade-off is structure versus speed. The spec workflow helps on multi-file features and team projects, but it adds friction for small edits, and reviewers report uneven results on long-running projects. Compare with Cursor, Claude Code and Google Antigravity.
Key Benefits
- Plan before code: Reviewable specs make agent output easier to steer and audit.
- Automation hooks: Background agents can update tests, docs or checks on triggers.
- Multi-surface: The same project context follows you from IDE to terminal to browser.
- Enterprise-ready: AWS backing plus SSO and centralized billing on Enterprise.
Use Cases
- Feature development — Turn a feature request into requirements, design and tasks, then implement it.
- Legacy modernization — Use specs and parallel agents to work through large codebases.
- Team conventions — Encode standards in steering files so every agent follows them.
- Automated upkeep — Hooks that keep tests and documentation in sync as code changes.
