Amazon's AI-Powered IDE Kiro Helps Vibe Coders with 'Spec Mode' (geekwire.com) 17
A promotional video for Amazon's Kiro software development system took a unique approach, writes GeekWire. "Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle's Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence..."
"Can the software development hero conquer the 'AI Slop Monster' to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?" Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon's effort to rethink how developers use AI. It's an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding... But rather than simply generating code from prompts [in "vibe mode"], Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists [in "spec mode"]. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable...
The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024... Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months...
Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies... During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company. Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro's spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they're seeing from adopting the tool... startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year's worth of Kiro credits.
Kiro offers property-based testing "to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified," according to the article — plus a checkpointing system that "lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent's steps when an idea goes sideways..."
"And yes, they've been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster."
"Can the software development hero conquer the 'AI Slop Monster' to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?" Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon's effort to rethink how developers use AI. It's an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding... But rather than simply generating code from prompts [in "vibe mode"], Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists [in "spec mode"]. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable...
The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024... Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months...
Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies... During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company. Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro's spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they're seeing from adopting the tool... startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year's worth of Kiro credits.
Kiro offers property-based testing "to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified," according to the article — plus a checkpointing system that "lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent's steps when an idea goes sideways..."
"And yes, they've been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster."
Gartner expects? (Score:2)
Stopped reading right there.
The Facebookification of coding (Score:5, Insightful)
Within 5 years, coders will only be able to output mediocre software at best because the entire environment they will be forced to work in can't do any better,
Re: (Score:3)
So, nothing changed?
No... (Score:1)
Specs? What specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the creators of vibe coding tools are completely ignorant of the fact that specs, just like unicorns or Bigfoot, are a mythical being.
Let me tell you how it works.
The client wants to add a feature. They pull a product manager, a developer and bunch of other completely irrelevant people into a meeting. The dev gets about about 10 minutes on a 2-hour call to ask his questions to clarify what the client really wants and to poke a thousand holes in the client's logic.
Ultimately, after 3-4 calls like this, the dev gets a rough idea of what needs to be done. A few high-level requirements are 0ut on a Confluence page that hardly anyone ever visits afterwards.
The dev gets to work and ultimately delivers the feature, with a few additional clarification meetings along the way for all those million of things you don't realise until you actually start coding the bloody thing.
The Confluence page gets a minor update at the end, some things are refreshed. No one knows why or for whom because the page is hardly ever visited by anyone.
The code is a de-facto spec. To lean a bit onto the mantra of crypto bros: code is law. Plus all the residual domain knowledge that remains in the short-lived memory of the dev.
That is the reality of 99% of software projects. There is no clear spec. Just enough to stop the product manager from moaning.
Code is the law. Code is the spec.
Re: (Score:2)
But just think, AI will take all those meetings and automate them! Sounds like a win to me!
Re: (Score:2)
>> you don't realise until you actually start coding the bloody thing
You actually code the thing? Why would you bother? These days you tell the AI what you want to accomplish in fairly general terms. If "The client wants to add a feature" it's all for the better, there's an existing app and framework which it can quickly grasp. You tell it to generate a proposal and an implementation and test plan which you can refine if necessary. It will write all that code for you while you go grab a snack, and hav
Re: Specs? What specs? (Score:2)
And you wonder why people don't want to employ your generation...
Sounds like you've still got a long way to go in your career. Come back when you learn what quality, maintainability and recurring contracts mean and why they matter.
A pinch of maturity wouldn't hurt either.
Re: (Score:2)
>> Sounds like you've still got a long way to go in your career
I've worked as a professional software developer for more than 40 years, sparky. Times have changed in case you didn't notice. These days you are going to use AI coding assistants or people like me are going to smoke people like you, and it may be a little late for you to find a new career.
Earlier this week I working with AI to plan a significant enhancement to a distributed microservices application. The AI estimated it would take about 3
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly this, the "spec" is almost always a very rough draft that is largely written and consumed by people that want to feel like they contribute to the project even though they don't understand the customer or the developer situation that well. You might reference it a bit in your first offering and then ignore it as the stakeholder sees what the spec produces and realizes the spec wasn't really what they wanted when they see it live.
Once upon a time more weight was given to design, but the industry larg
My clients would never accept vibe coding. (Score:2)
Simple reason. If the same input can produce different output depending on the day and the whimsical nature of a statistical machine, then the end result carries too much risk and is completely useless from the client's point of view.
I can't imagine any serious client would ever agree to vibe coding. Business solutions need reliability.
Re: My clients would never accept vibe coding. (Score:2)
Re: My clients would never accept vibe coding. (Score:2)
I think you're confusing vibe coding (where all code is generated from human instructions) with AI-supported development.
Re: My clients would never accept vibe coding. (Score:2)
We've had this... context files are your friend. (Score:2)
Nothing special (Score:2)
I installed Kiro and tried it a few times a couple of months ago when the prompts were free. It worked fine but it's just another vscode clone with an AI chat panel. When they started charging to use it I reverted to a different platform that I like better.
All of the premier AI models will perform a "spec-driven development approach" if you tell them to. These days I am working on enhancements to an existing project (which the AI has already thoroughly documented for me and for itself). I describe the speci