Amazon Kiro: The Spec-Driven AI IDE Replacing Amazon Q

Amazon Kiro shipped initially as what AWS called a "preview" - and quietly detonated every developer's assumption about what AI-assisted coding should look like. Subsequently, new Amazon Q Developer signups are blocked, with full end-of-support arriving shortly thereafter. This is not an incremental IDE update. It is a complete architectural rebrand of AWS's coding intelligence layer, forced by the recognition that reactive autocomplete tools are failing at production scale.

The fundamental claim Kiro makes is this: structured specification before code generation catches errors that post-hoc AI patching never will. That thesis is either the future of agentic development or an expensive productivity tax, depending entirely on how your team works. This guide breaks down the architecture, the pricing math, the honest capability comparison against Cursor and Claude Code, and the migration path from Amazon Q with enough specificity that you can make the call without reading six Medium articles that all repeat the same three bullet points.

(Note: Kiro is an Amazon IDE product — not the Roccat Kiro gaming mouse, not the Kiriko cleaning brand, and not the 1953 Egyptian film. Lol.)

Key Takeaways

Amazon Kiro is AWS's production-grade, spec-driven AI IDE — a VS Code fork that replaces Amazon Q Developer as the company's primary developer intelligence product, requiring formal specification before code generation.

• The Spec Tax is real: Spec-mode requests cost 5x more than vibe-mode ($0.20 vs. $0.04/credit) — but the upfront cost targets a 23–37% reduction in downstream logic errors (OSVBench).
• Amazon Q Developer is sunsetted: New signups are blocked ahead of the end-of-support phase. Migration to Kiro is the only official path.
• Pricing is tiered by workflow intensity: Free (50 requests/month) through Power ($200/month, 1,250 spec requests) — with the critical distinction that spec and vibe requests draw from different cost pools.
• Setup is fast; the learning curve is the spec discipline: IDE installation takes under 10 minutes via kiro.dev; the shift to requirements.md-first development is the real adoption barrier.

Key Actionable Trends

The three moves that matter right now for engineering teams evaluating Kiro:

• Spec-first workflow adoption: Start writing requirements.md before your next greenfield feature — validate the methodology before committing to a paid tier — implement in the upcoming sprints.
• Amazon Q migration: Audit active Q Developer subscriptions against the signup block and EoS timeline — begin migration planning immediately.
• Credit tier rightsizing: Map your team's spec-to-vibe request ratio before choosing between Pro ($20) and Pro+ ($40) — the 5x cost differential makes tier selection a material budget decision.

Kiro's Paradigm Shift

Amazon Kiro, released in public preview, is a VS Code fork with a structured spec engine at its core — not a plugin, not a chat assistant bolted to an existing IDE, and not a rebadged Amazon Q. AWS positioned it as the answer to what engineers in production environments already knew: reactive autocomplete tools generate plausible code that fails at system boundaries, and no amount of inline suggestion tuning fixes that structural problem. Early reports of Amazon Kiro's architecture confirmed the ambition — and the departure from the incremental approach Q Developer had taken.

The architectural claim at Kiro's center is that agentic AI requires formal specifications to function correctly at production scale. Where vibe-coding tools (including Cursor's default mode and GitHub Copilot) accept natural language prompts and generate code immediately, Kiro requires the developer to produce a machine-parseable specification before any code is written. That specification gets stored in .kiro/specs/[feature]/ as three structured files — requirements.md, design.md, and tasks.md — which the agent then executes against. The official AWS Kiro documentation frames this as "proactive" versus "reactive" AI development.

Kiro's layered architecture — the spec engine sits between developer intent and code generation, unlike autocomplete-first tools where those two stages are collapsed.

Caption: Kiro's layered architecture — the spec engine sits between developer intent and code generation, unlike autocomplete-first tools where those two stages are collapsed.

For teams building autonomous AI agents or multi-service AWS architectures, the implications are non-trivial: Kiro's spec system creates a persistent, version-controllable record of system intent that survives context window resets and team member changes — a genuine structural advantage that inline suggestions cannot replicate.

VS Code Fork with Spec Engine

Kiro's installation base is the VS Code engine, which means all VS Code extensions load natively, .vscode/settings.json configurations transfer without modification, and institutional knowledge of VS Code keybindings/workflows carries over. The differentiation is the .kiro/ directory that Kiro initializes in every project: it holds steering/ (persistent context files applied to every session), specs/ (feature-specific structured plans), and hooks/ (event-driven automation triggers).

The underlying model layer runs exclusively on Amazon Bedrock. Currently, Kiro uses Claude Sonnet 4.5 for standard requests, with Opus 4.7 available exclusively to Kiro (notably removed from Amazon Q Developer Pro as of the recent model update). Multi-model support beyond Bedrock is not currently available — a meaningful constraint for teams with existing Anthropic or OpenAI API contracts who were using Cursor's model-agnostic configuration.

Superseding Amazon Q

AWS's official announcement confirmed what engineers had anticipated for months: Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins reach the end-of-support phase, with new signups blocked following the announcement. Existing subscriptions can add new users through the EoS date. The Q Developer experience in the AWS Console, documentation tools, mobile app, and Slack/Teams integrations is explicitly excluded from the sunset — only the IDE plugin and paid coding subscriptions are being deprecated.

Amazon Q Developer's IDE plugin EoS removes the only serious alternative AWS offered for agentic in-IDE development. Teams clinging to Q Developer's familiar inline suggestion model have until the final cutoff to transition — but the recent model change (removing Opus 4.6 from Q Developer Pro) signals that active investment has already stopped.

The Spec-Driven Workflow

Kiro reduces logic errors in structured spec scenarios by 23–37% versus reactive AI approaches (OSVBench) — a data point that either justifies the workflow overhead or doesn't, depending entirely on the complexity of the system being built. For a bug fix or a single-endpoint addition, the spec overhead is cost without proportionate return. For a greenfield microservice, a cross-team feature with compliance requirements, or a refactor touching more than three system boundaries, the spec-first approach eliminates entire categories of late-cycle rework.

The core workflow shift is that intent formalization moves before code generation, not after. In vibe-coding tools, developers write a prompt → get code → discover ambiguities → iterate. In Kiro's spec mode, developers write a feature description → Kiro generates a requirements.md with EARS notation (WHEN [condition] THE SYSTEM SHALL [behavior]) → the developer reviews and edits → Kiro generates design.md (architecture, sequence diagrams) → tasks.md (dependency-ordered implementation tasks) → code generation begins. Each phase is a human review gate. That is the design.

Kiro's three-phase spec pipeline inserts two human review gates before code generation — the key structural difference from reactive autocomplete tools.

Caption: Kiro's three-phase spec pipeline inserts two human review gates before code generation — the key structural difference from reactive autocomplete tools.

The Spec Trinity Files

Every Kiro spec generates three files stored under .kiro/specs/[feature-name]/. Understanding their structure is necessary for evaluating whether the workflow fits your team.

requirements.md uses EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation. Every functional requirement follows the pattern WHEN [trigger] THE SYSTEM SHALL [behavior], with optional IF [condition] clauses. This is not informal markdown — it is machine-parseable by Kiro's agent for task decomposition. Non-functional requirements (performance targets, compliance constraints, error handling expectations) are captured in a separate section. The file is editable: Kiro generates a draft, you modify it.

design.md documents architectural decisions: system overview, component relationships, data models, API contracts, and sequence diagrams (rendered as Mermaid by default). Kiro generates this from requirements.md, but it expects developer annotation for decisions that require organizational context — infrastructure constraints, team ownership, existing service dependencies.

tasks.md is the execution plan: numbered, dependency-ordered implementation tasks, each mapped to specific requirements from requirements.md. Kiro's agent uses this file to track progress and resume sessions without context reconstruction overhead.

The three-file structure doubles as audit trail for scalable SaaS architecture documentation — a common gap in teams that rely on informal ticket comments for design rationale.

Hooks, Powers, and MCP

Beyond the spec engine, Kiro adds three capability layers that distinguish it from a spec-aware VS Code extension:

Hooks are event-driven automation scripts executed on filesystem events (file save, test failure, build completion). A hook watching for *.spec.ts file saves can automatically trigger a test run and surface failures to the Kiro chat context — without the developer switching contexts. Hooks are defined in .kiro/hooks/ as structured YAML with trigger conditions, commands, and output routing.

Powers are composable capability extensions — think of them as named agent subprocedures that can be invoked from chat or from within spec tasks. AWS ships built-in Powers for documentation generation, test scaffolding, and AWS service integration. The Powers API is open for custom extension.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers integrate external tool context into Kiro's agent. Configuration lives in .vscode/mcp.json. Verified integrations include AWS API MCP server (awslabs.aws-api-mcp-server), Backlog.md, GitHub, and custom endpoints — adding real-time context from external systems to the agent's decision-making without prompt injection.

Kiro's three capability extension layers allow the agent to respond to filesystem events, execute composable subprocedures, and pull live context from external tools.

Caption: Kiro's three capability extension layers allow the agent to respond to filesystem events, execute composable subprocedures, and pull live context from external tools.

Five Spec Template Patterns

These are the five structural patterns engineering teams report using most frequently. Each maps to a canonical feature type and seeds requirements.md with the correct EARS structure:

1. REST API Endpoint: WHEN a [HTTP_METHOD] request is received at [/path] with [parameters] THE SYSTEM SHALL [return response] IF [authentication conditions] THEN [authorization check]

2. Background Job / Queue Consumer: WHEN a message is received on [queue_name] with [schema] THE SYSTEM SHALL [process action] WITHIN [time_sla] AND LOG [outcome]

3. UI State Management: WHEN the user performs [action] IN [component_context] THE SYSTEM SHALL [update state] AND REFLECT [visual change] WITHIN [response_time]

4. Data Migration: WHEN [trigger_event] occurs THE SYSTEM SHALL [migrate_action] FOR [data_scope] MAINTAINING [integrity_constraint] AND REVERTING [rollback_condition]

5. Third-Party Integration Webhook: WHEN [external_service] sends [event_type] to [endpoint] THE SYSTEM SHALL [validate_payload] THEN [process_action] RETURNING [response_code] ON [error_condition]

Each template drops directly into requirements.md as the functional requirements section skeleton — the developer fills the bracketed variables, Kiro generates the corresponding design.md from the completed structure.

Kiro vs. Cursor vs. Claude Code

The central distinction is not feature count — it's philosophy: Kiro enforces structured specification before code generation; Cursor optimizes for speed of code generation with optional structure; Claude Code offers chat-based code manipulation with VS Code integration but without autonomous project management. A recent comparative analysis from AugmentCode testing both tools on a real production feature found that Kiro's spec enforcement caught three requirements ambiguities that Cursor generated code for without surfacing — all three required post-implementation rework in the Cursor scenario. That data point is not universal, but it is representative of where the tools diverge structurally.

Across production-relevant dimensions, Kiro leads on spec enforcement and AWS compliance; Cursor leads on speed and model flexibility.

Caption: Across production-relevant dimensions, Kiro leads on spec enforcement and AWS compliance; Cursor leads on speed and model flexibility.

Spec Structure vs. Vibe Flow

Cursor's 8-parallel-agent execution at sub-200ms completions is a genuine speed advantage for iterative, exploratory coding — refactoring a function, adding a test, chasing a bug. Kiro's sequential, spec-gated approach generates more overhead per interaction but produces a machine-readable specification artifact as a byproduct — something Cursor's Plan Mode explicitly does not do. For a comparison with agentic IDEs like Cursor in other product categories, the speed-vs-structure trade-off maps consistently.

Where Each Tool Wins

Kiro wins on: Greenfield feature development with multiple stakeholders, compliance-sensitive code requiring documented requirements, AWS-native architectures (Bedrock, Lambda, DynamoDB), teams where context continuity across sessions matters, and any scenario where "why was this built this way" needs a durable answer.

Cursor wins on: Rapid iteration, bug fixing, single-file refactors, non-AWS stacks requiring model flexibility (GPT-4o, Gemini), and teams that want agentic assistance without mandatory spec overhead. The paradigm shift analysis on dev.to found Kiro reduced logic errors 23–37% in complex feature development — but that advantage narrowed to near-zero for simple CRUD operations. Vibe-coding tools close the gap entirely where feature complexity is low.

Claude Code wins on: Quick ad-hoc refactors, explanation-heavy workflows, and teams with existing Anthropic API contracts who need VS Code integration without committing to a new IDE paradigm.

When to Switch to Kiro

Stay on Cursor if: Your team ships predominantly small, iterative changes; you need multi-model flexibility for cost optimization; you use non-AWS infrastructure where Bedrock integration is irrelevant; or your development velocity is measured in hours-to-deploy rather than weeks-to-production-ready.

Switch to Kiro if: You are building greenfield systems with compliance requirements, managing a codebase where context rot across sessions creates rework, running an AWS-native stack where Bedrock models and IAM-aware tooling matter, or leading a team where the discipline of formal requirements benefits code quality over time. The 23–37% error reduction has a real cost threshold — it only justifies the spec overhead at feature complexity above a certain threshold. That threshold is roughly "a feature that touches more than two service boundaries or requires documented acceptance criteria."

The Amazon Q Developer Sunset

AWS's end-of-support announcement is precise in scope — and imprecise in developer communications, which has caused confusion. Here is what is and is not affected.

Affected (IDE plugin and paid subscriptions):

• Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins (VS Code, JetBrains) → Reaching end-of-support
• New Amazon Q Developer paid subscriptions → Blocked
• Amazon Q Developer Pro model access → Opus 4.6 removed recently; Opus 4.7 not added (Kiro exclusive)

Not affected:

• Amazon Q in the AWS Console
• Amazon Q in AWS documentation and chat apps (Slack, Teams)
• Amazon Q mobile app
• Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities (.NET, Java modernization)

The practical effect for engineering teams is a critical decision window: migrate to Kiro before the final cutoff or lose IDE-level agentic assistance. The model degradation means that waiting carries immediate capability cost, not just future risk. For teams already using software modernization strategies that rely on Q Developer's transformation tooling, note that the transformation features are explicitly preserved — only the IDE plugin is being deprecated.

The migration path splits by account type — Builder ID personal users have the simplest path; enterprise Pro subscribers need to manage subscription continuity during transition.

Caption: The migration path splits by account type — Builder ID personal users have the simplest path; enterprise Pro subscribers need to manage subscription continuity during transition.

Builder ID Migration Path

If you authenticated to Amazon Q Developer with an AWS Builder ID (the personal/free path), migration to Kiro requires:

1. Download Kiro IDE from kiro.dev — VS Code settings and extension configurations transfer automatically
2. Sign in with the same Builder ID credentials — no new account creation needed
3. Your existing free-tier request history does not carry over; Kiro Free starts at 50 requests/month fresh
4. Install kiro-cli via the documented curl command (available at kiro.dev/docs/getting-started) for terminal-based workflows
5. Recreate any custom Amazon Q Developer personas as Kiro steering files in .kiro/steering/

Total migration time for an individual developer with no custom tooling: approximately 20–30 minutes. The VS Code extension parity means IDE muscle memory transfers intact.

Enterprise Pro Transition

For teams on Amazon Q Developer Pro ($20/user/month), the transition involves both tooling migration and subscription management. Existing Q Developer Pro subscriptions can add new users through the EoS date, but new subscriptions are blocked. AWS has committed to publishing migration tooling and documentation — as of this publication, that tooling is in preview.

The critical evaluation: Amazon Q Developer Pro provides 1,000 requests/user/month at $20. Kiro Pro provides 225 vibe + 125 spec requests (350 total base requests) at the same $20 price point. The request count decrease is significant — compensated by the argument that spec requests generate substantially more output per interaction. Teams running at high request volume (bug-fix loops, rapid iteration) will likely need Kiro Pro+ ($40/user/month, 700 combined requests) to maintain comparable throughput.

Pricing Model & Spec Tax

Kiro's pricing structure introduces a concept most AI coding tool evaluations ignore: the differential cost of structured versus unstructured AI interaction. We call this The Spec Tax — the 5x credit cost differential between spec-mode requests ($0.20/credit) and vibe-mode requests ($0.04/credit) built into Kiro's overage pricing. The Spec Tax is not a punitive design choice; it reflects the substantially higher compute load of spec generation (multi-step reasoning, structured output formatting, dependency resolution across requirements.md → design.md → tasks.md). But it makes tier selection a material budget decision in a way that flat-rate tools do not.

The Register's detailed breakdown of Kiro's pricing tiers labeled the original pricing structure "a wallet-wrecking tragedy" — and while subsequent tier revisions addressed the worst cliffs, the 5x overage differential remains. Understanding exactly where your team will hit overages is the prerequisite for right-tiering.

Caption: The Spec Tax becomes most visible at overage: every spec request beyond the tier allocation costs 5x more than an equivalent vibe request.

The Four Pricing Tiers

Current pricing per Kiro's official pricing page. GovCloud deployments carry approximately 20% premium.

New users receive 500 bonus credits valid for 30 days — enough to complete 2–3 full spec cycles across a moderately complex feature before committing to a tier. The Free tier is vibe-only: no spec requests are included, which means the free tier cannot meaningfully evaluate Kiro's core value proposition. Teams evaluating whether spec-driven development fits their workflow need at minimum the Pro tier for genuine assessment.

The practical allocation math:

Assuming a team of three developers on Pro ($60/month total): 675 vibe requests + 375 spec requests monthly. At roughly 2–3 spec requests per feature (requirements generation, design review, task decomposition), that supports 125–187 feature cycles per month — plausible for a small team on a feature-rich sprint. Overage risk appears when a single complex feature spawns 15–20 spec sub-tasks, each consuming a request. That scenario hits Pro overage limits in a single sprint week for a small team. Pro+ mitigates this; Power is intended for large teams or CI/CD pipeline integration.

Spec vs. Vibe Cost Model

Caption: The Spec Tax adds roughly 3–4x to per-sprint overage costs for spec-heavy workflows — offset against the error reduction value if downstream rework is measured.

The 5x differential makes the spec-to-vibe ratio the critical variable in tier selection. Teams using Kiro predominantly in Vibe mode for chat-based coding assistance are essentially paying Pro pricing for what amounts to a premium VS Code setup — the $20 Pro tier's 225 vibe requests is competitive with similar tiers across the market. The Spec Tax only activates for teams actually using the spec engine.

Right-tiering heuristic: If your monthly spec request consumption will exceed 125 (the Pro spec allocation), move to Pro+. If you anticipate a complex greenfield phase requiring sustained spec cycles, start at Pro+ and evaluate downgrading after the initial build phase. Power tier economics only justify for teams running Kiro in automated pipelines or CI/CD contexts with sustained high-volume spec generation.

Startup Credits & GovCloud

AWS's startup program offers a free year of Kiro Pro+ for qualifying startups through the AWS Kiro Startup Credits Program. The qualification criteria align with standard AWS Activate eligibility — companies less than 10 years old with under $10M in AWS annual spend qualify for evaluation. At $40/month retail, the free year represents $480 in direct cost avoidance, with the primary benefit being the ability to evaluate Pro+ spec request volume without budgetary pressure during early product development.

GovCloud deployments (AWS GovCloud US-East and US-West) are available but carry a pricing premium of approximately 20% across all tiers. The enterprise AI tool pricing and ROI comparisons for GovCloud-constrained teams should factor this overhead when modeling total cost against Cursor or other tools without GovCloud requirements.

Under 10 Minutes Setup

Kiro's CLI installation requires a single curl command; the IDE downloads from kiro.dev in under 5 minutes. The technical setup barrier is genuinely low — the adoption barrier is the discipline shift to requirements-first development, not the tooling installation (AWS Builder Field Guide). Experienced developers report that the first spec attempt takes 30–45 minutes; the second takes 15; by the fifth, the workflow is natural.

IDE vs. CLI Installation

Prerequisites: uv (Python package manager), Python 3.10+, AWS CLI (configured with valid profile and region), Node.js 18+.

IDE installation (recommended for most workflows):

1. Navigate to kiro.dev → Download for your OS (macOS, Windows, Linux)
2. Install and open — the VS Code engine loads all existing VS Code extensions automatically
3. Sign in with AWS Builder ID or IAM Identity Center credentials
4. Kiro initializes .kiro/ in your project root on first project open — no manual configuration required
5. Verify MCP servers: run timeout 15s uvx awslabs.aws-api-mcp-server@latest in the integrated terminal — output confirms Bedrock connectivity

CLI installation (for pipeline and automation contexts):
Run the installation command from kiro.dev/docs/getting-started/ (curl-based, single command). The CLI supports MCP server management via kiro-cli mcp add --scope global --name [server] --command [command], spec generation via /spec command, and /plan mode for repository research before spec creation.

Settings reference:

Caption: The .kiro/ directory structure created on first initialization — steering, specs, and hooks directories are the three operational layers of every Kiro project.

First requirements.md File

The fastest path to a functional spec is to let Kiro generate the skeleton, then edit. In the Kiro chat panel:

1. Click the Spec button (or type /spec [feature description]) — example: /spec Add OAuth2 authentication with Google and GitHub providers
2. Kiro generates a draft requirements.md in EARS notation — review the generated WHEN/SHALL statements for accuracy and completeness
3. Edit the file directly: add non-functional requirements (latency targets, compliance constraints, error handling expectations) in the designated section
4. Approve and progress to design.md generation — Kiro reads your edited requirements and generates architecture documentation with Mermaid diagrams
5. Review design.md, annotate any infrastructure constraints your team owns (existing service dependencies, database choices, team ownership)
6. Approve and progress to tasks.md — numbered, dependency-ordered implementation tasks

Estimated time: ~30–45 minutes for a mid-complexity feature first attempt. The open-source AI agent setup patterns for MCP server configuration map directly to Kiro's .vscode/mcp.json format — teams with existing MCP infrastructure can reuse configurations without modification.

FAQ

What is Amazon Kiro?
Amazon Kiro is a production-grade, spec-driven AI IDE built as a VS Code fork by AWS. Unlike standard autocomplete tools, it requires developers to create a formal machine-parseable specification before any code generation begins. This methodical process systematically reduces downstream logic errors in complex enterprise systems. For teams building scalable architectures, this provides a durable audit trail of system intent.

Does Amazon Kiro replace Amazon Q Developer?
Yes, AWS has confirmed that Amazon Kiro fully supersedes the Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins. New subscriptions for the legacy Q Developer tool have been blocked, and an official end-of-support timeline is underway. Existing users are strongly encouraged to migrate their workflows to Kiro to maintain access to advanced AI coding capabilities.

What is the "Spec Tax" in Kiro's pricing model?
The "Spec Tax" refers to the significant cost differential between structured spec-mode requests and standard vibe-mode requests within the IDE. Every spec-mode request inherently demands more computational overhead, resulting in a credit cost that is five times higher than standard queries. Engineering managers must carefully monitor this differential, as extensive specification generation can rapidly trigger overage fees. According to The Register's pricing analysis, this dynamic makes tier selection a material budget consideration.

Can I use Cursor's models with Amazon Kiro?
Amazon Kiro operates exclusively on the Amazon Bedrock infrastructure, utilizing specific Claude models for its underlying agentic reasoning. It does not currently support the multi-provider configurations found in alternative tools like Cursor. Consequently, teams with existing direct API contracts with OpenAI or Anthropic cannot bridge those external models into the Kiro environment.

How long does it take to migrate to Amazon Kiro?
Individual developers authenticating via an AWS Builder ID can typically complete the initial IDE installation and configuration in under ten minutes. The installation imports existing VS Code settings and extensions automatically to minimize workflow disruption. However, mastering the required EARS notation and adjusting to the mandatory spec-first methodology represents the true adoption barrier, often requiring multiple sessions to feel entirely natural.

Conclusion

The transition to Amazon Kiro represents a fundamental shift away from reactive vibe-coding toward a proactive, spec-driven paradigm. While the mandatory specification process and the associated "Spec Tax" introduce clear upfront friction, the resulting decrease in logic errors makes it a compelling choice for enterprise-grade feature development. As the legacy Amazon Q Developer tools reach their end-of-support, migrating to Kiro ensures uninterrupted access to AWS's premier agentic capabilities. Organizations evaluating this shift must carefully weigh their spec-to-vibe ratio to optimize pricing tiers and avoid unexpected overage costs. For teams seeking comprehensive guidance on implementing these advanced workflows, exploring autonomous AI agents can provide the strategic foundation needed to scale production efficiently.