Kiro is AWS’s agentic IDE: spec-driven by default, with a CLI, web, mobile, and a multi-agent Crew, metered in credits from a 50-credit free tier to a $200/month Power plan. Facts below verified as of 2026-09-13.
Kiro is the only major IDE vendor that treats specs, requirements, and design documents as the primary artifact rather than chat, and that bet either matches how your team already works or will feel like bureaucracy.
What it is #
Two modes organize everything: vibe mode for direct iteration and spec mode, where Kiro generates requirements and design docs you edit before implementation proceeds. Agent hooks trigger on file changes or schedules, and a subscription covers the IDE, the CLI, Kiro on the web, mobile, Crew (parallel agents), and ACP-compatible IDEs, an unusually wide surface list. The default model router is Auto, mixing frontier and specialist models, with explicit choices spanning GPT-5.6, Claude Opus 5 and Sonnet 5, DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM-5, and Qwen3 Coder Next.
Status #
Active and enterprise-ready. The vendor changelog shows weekly releases, with the CLI at 2.21.0 (patched through 2.21.4 by September 11, 2026) and the IDE at 1.0.437 on September 1, 2026, the same day Kiro Web reached general availability and Kiro came under AWS ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, and Crew 0.6.0 added session harness selection (Claude Code, Codex, or KAS) and remote crews on September 5, 2026; pricing, GovCloud availability, and enterprise billing through AWS are all shipped. The public issue tracker (kirodotdev/Kiro, about 4.3k stars as of 2026-09-13) saw only README docs and Dependabot dependency commits on August 26-27, 2026, with no feature commits since June 22, 2026, so release evidence still lives on kiro.dev, not the repository. Its spec workflow has been influential enough that community projects port it to other harnesses.
Strengths #
- Specs as first-class artifacts turn agent work into reviewable documents, the same pull-based review pattern this blog argues for elsewhere.
- One subscription spans IDE, CLI, web, mobile, Crew, and ACP-compatible editors.
- Free tier includes Claude Sonnet 4.5 and open-weight models, a genuine trial rather than a teaser.
- Enterprise identity, billing, and GovCloud come from AWS machinery that orgs already run.
Cautions #
- Credits are the trap: 1,000 credits on Pro sounds large until spec tasks, refinements, and agent hooks each meter fractions of a credit at model-specific multipliers, and add-ons cost $0.04 per credit.
- Terms explicitly forbid routing subscription usage through third-party automation harnesses, so your Kiro credits stay in Kiro surfaces.
- An August 2025 writeup documented arbitrary code execution via indirect prompt injection in the IDE.
- The client is closed; the GitHub repository is feedback and docs, not source.
Pricing #
Free: $0 with 50 credits, open-weight models plus Claude Sonnet 4.5. Pro $20 (1,000 credits), Pro+ $40 (2,000), Pro Max $100 (5,000), Power $200 (10,000), add-on credits at $0.04 each, enterprise via AWS with SSO and overage controls, GovCloud priced about 20% higher, as of 2026-09-13.
Compared to #
- Cursor: chat-first versus spec-first; pick Kiro when requirements artifacts matter to your team.
- JetBrains IDEs: deep analysis versus spec workflow; both sell credits.
- VS Code + Copilot: the neutral host; Kiro is an opinionated environment with AWS gravity.
Bottom line #
Recommended for spec-disciplined teams, especially those already buying through AWS. Not for credit-averse solo engineers or anyone who wants an open client.
Changes #
- 2026-08-24 - Created in the owner-requested Surfaces expansion with credit tiers and the incident record.
- 2026-08-25 - Corrected the status attribution, moving release-cadence evidence to the vendor changelog and adding it as a reference.
- 2026-09-02 - Added Kiro Web general availability and the ISO 27001 certification.
- 2026-09-12 - Recorded Crew 0.6.0 session-harness selection alongside CLI patch updates.
See also #
- Agentic Coding Tools Landscape - the surface layer this note belongs to
- Send Implementation, Not Issue - why generated specs plus implementation beats bare tickets
- OpenCode - the open harness alternative, also ACP-reachable
References #
https://kiro.dev/ - product surfaces, modes, hooks
https://github.com/kirodotdev/Kiro - issue tracker, only docs and dependency commits since June 22, 2026, about 4.3k stars as of 2026-09-13
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45044061 - the prompt-injection code execution writeup