[AWS] DevTools Evangelism Kiro's Edition

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

This is the fifth post in the Japan AWS Top Engineers Advent Calendar 2025.

Today, I’d like to introduce Kiro, a character that frequently appears in my Advent Calendar‑related posts. I have written about Kiro in several past articles, so I’ll quote those articles and provide an overall overview.

• Japan AWS Top Engineers Advent Calendar 2025:
• My previous article on Kiro:
• Some of the images in this article are slides I used at JAWS‑UG Morning Meeting #72:

What is AWS Kiro?

AWS Kiro is a service offered by AWS in two versions: an IDE and a CLI. It provides most of the capabilities of Amazon QDeveloper—such as AI chat and Vibe coding—while adding features not available in QDeveloper, including specification‑driven development and multimodal AI interaction.

Recently, I have been using the Kiro IDE version more often than Amazon QDeveloper on VSCode.

What You Can Do with AWS Kiro

Kiro’s Icons are Cute

While many AWS service icons are cool, Kiro’s icons feature a ghost motif and are very cute.

Kiro Can Do Almost Everything VSCode Can Do

Kiro offers most of the functionality of VSCode. If you’re familiar with VSCode, you’ll appreciate that Kiro can display terminals and consoles, install extensions, and more.

Agentic Chat

Ask Kiro for Research

Even if you’re not a developer, you can chat with Kiro to find out anything.

Example: I asked Kiro what Kiro is.

Ask Kiro to Investigate an Error

When you provide an error message, Kiro explains how to resolve it and confirms any required configuration changes or software installations.

Example conversation:

Implementation Assistance with Vibe Coding

Requesting Implementation from Kiro

Describe the desired implementation in a chat and submit a request; Kiro will generate the code.

Example: I asked Kiro to create CDK code.

Specification‑Driven Development (Spec)

Kiro supports specification‑driven development. Instead of jumping straight to implementation, you first create requirements, design, and a task list.

Specification‑Driven Development view:

You can start a Spec session by selecting “Spec” from the “New Session” menu in Kiro chat.

Selecting Spec:

Files generated by Spec:

Predefine Implementation Rules with Steering

When implementing, you may need to follow coding conventions, guidelines, or function‑specific rules. Kiro manages these as steering files and applies them during code generation. You can let Kiro create general steering rules or define your own.

Creating a steering file:

Example steering file:

Expanding the Scope of Use by Using an MCP Server

Kiro can call MCP server functions. There are two ways to configure an MCP server in Kiro:

1. Remote MCP server – add connection information to mcp.json and use the features remotely.
2. Local MCP server – set up the server on your PC and connect to it.

You can also clone the MCP server published on GitHub.