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."
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