Kiro AI

What is Kiro and how does it help developers?

Kiro is an agentic AI development environment (IDE, CLI, web) that helps developers move from prototype to production by turning prompts into detailed specs, working code, docs, and tests. It uses AI agents to manage intent, complete long-running tasks, and validate code correctness, learning how you work.

What is spec-driven development and why is it important for Kiro?

Spec-driven development, as pioneered by Kiro, involves defining requirements, system design, and tasks with AI before writing code. This approach explicitly documents reasoning and implementation decisions, allowing Kiro to handle more complex tasks efficiently and avoid misinterpreting context, which can be a limitation of 'vibe coding'.

What are 'Powers' in Kiro and how do they work?

Powers are specialized contexts and tools that add expertise to Kiro agents on-demand. They encapsulate best practices from dev tool providers and domain experts, steering agents for specific use cases. Users can find or create powers, install them with one click, and Kiro dynamically activates relevant ones based on conversation context.

Which AI models does Kiro use?

By default, Kiro uses 'Auto', an agent that combines various frontier models (like Sonnet 4.5) with specialized models for tasks, intent detection, and caching. Users can also choose to exclusively use models like Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5, Opus 4.5, Opus 4.6, or Opus 4.7, as well as open-weight models like Qwen3 Coder Next, DeepSeek v3.2, and MiniMax 2.1.

Can I import my existing VS Code settings into Kiro?

Yes, Kiro is based on Code OSS, so you can import your VS Code settings, themes, and Open VSX compatible plugins during the Kiro onboarding flow.