Amazon Web Services has created what it’s calling an “agentic IDE” that it claims avoids the pitfalls of vibe coding.
With the advent of generative AI, developers have experimented with using LLMs to rapidly generate and debug code in a process that’s come to be known as vibe coding. But the code is often of low quality and requires more time to debug and modify than it ultimately saves. A recent study found that in some cases developers believe these tools are saving them time when it’s in fact precisely the opposite.
AWS’s tool is called “Kiro” and, as Deepak Singh, veep for developer agents and experiences, explained to The Register, it’s built around a conversational interface that offers developers the chance to explain what they’re trying to build. Kiro uses generative AI to produce its response, which initially takes the form of a spec, not actual code.
Singh said the specs are “just markdown or text or pseudocode and are written like user stories.”
Nikhil Swaminathan, AWS senior manager for agentic AI developer tools, explained that each user story “includes EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation acceptance criteria covering edge cases developers typically handle when building from basic user stories.”
Kiro’s output also includes a list of services and actual code that’s pushed to Git. Kiro can also handle multiple specs created by different teams that all work on different aspects of a project.
Singh suggested that working with specs matters because when developers use coding assistants such as AWS’s own Q, code quality is low and few bother to keep track of which prompts produce good results.
Spec produced by AWS agentic IDE Kiro – click to enlarge
AWS believes Kiro delivers code that’s closer to production-ready, in an environment that’s better suited to finishing a project and then maintaining it.
To that latter end, Kiro offers event-driven automations called “hooks.” Singh suggested Kiro users could create a hook that automatically reviews and optimizes code every time a developer adds code to a repository.
AWS built Kiro on the open source Code OSS editor and can use plugins written for VS Code and Open VSX.
Unusually for AWS, the product is a desktop client, but users can choose which cloud-hosted models it uses to generate specs and code. It’s currently in preview, but AWS plans to charge $19.99 a month with a to-be-determined number of calls to LLMs.
Singh said that despite having created Kiro and positioning it as an IDE for the agentic age, AWS still sees a role for coding assistants, and vibe coding as a way for developers to tinker and experiment. ®