Positioning Amazon as a direct rival to established tools like GitHub Copilot, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially entered the AI-powered coding market with the launch of Kiro, a new integrated development environment (IDE) that is designed to transform the way developers write, document, and maintain code. It promises to transform rapid AI-generated vibe-coding into robust enterprise-grade software systems.
Vibe-coding, a term coined by Andrej Karpthy, is a fast, creative process that can generate impressive demos but often leaves projects lacking the clarity, documentation, and structure needed for real-world production environments. For Amazon’s Kiro, as it is stated on its website, it aims to move development “from vibe coding to viable code” by focusing on specification-driven workflows.
At the core of Kiro is its specs and hooks system. “Kiro is great at ‘vibe coding’ but goes way beyond that — Kiro’s strength is getting those prototypes into production systems with features such as specs and hooks,” said a blog post that was co-authored by Nikhil Swaminathan, Head of Agentic AI developer tools at AWS, and Deepak Singh, a VP at AWS.
The specs system is designed to impose order and clarity from the very beginning of a project. According to the blog post, Kiro specs are “artifacts that prove useful anytime you need to think through a feature in-depth, refactor work that needs upfront planning, or when you want to understand the behavior of systems.”
In other words, if prompted “add a review system for products” while building an e-commerce application, Kiro specs can instantly generate user stories and acceptance criteria that are both formatted using a structured approach called EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax), as explained in the blog post.
It can also instantly generate technical designs, including diagrams, TypeScript, interface, database layouts, and API documentation, as well as actionable implementation plans that are broken into clear steps with testing guidelines. This solves the common problem of developers struggling with documentation, code provenance, and onboarding.
For Kiro hooks, they are designed to be smart automations that respond to file events like saves, changes, or deletions. According to the blog post, the feature “acts like an experienced developer catching things you miss or completing boilerplate tasks in the background as you work.”
The feature is expected to update tests automatically if code changes, refresh documentation when interfaces or APIs are edited, scan for security issues before code is committed, and enforce coding standards across teams.
How Kiro stacks up against GitHub Copilot
Everything Kiro brings is quite different from what GitHub’s Copilot offers. While GitHub Copilot popularized token-based code completion and in-context suggestions, Kiro with the hooks and specs bring a new addition to the vibe-coding table — goal-oriented orchestration.
Seeing as Kiro was built on Code OSS, the open-source backbone behind Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, developers coming from VS Code can find their settings, plugins, and workflows largely intact, while also gaining access to advanced AI integration.
Where Amazon Kiro offers spec-driven and deeply structured development workflow, GitHub Copilot offers autocomplete, ad hoc suggestions that leaves space for mistakes to occur. Also, where Kiro has a quality assurance that is built-in through the Kiro hooks feature, GitHub Copilot relies on external tools.
As such, Kiro’s structured, spec-driven design brings forth a new standard for AI-powered software development (vibe-coding), where automation, documentation and other best practices are built in by default, therefore streamlining software development and code consistencies.
“Our vision is to solve the fundamental challenges that make building software products so difficult — from ensuring design alignment across teams and resolving conflicting requirements, to eliminating tech debt, bringing rigor to code reviews, and preserving institutional knowledge when senior engineers leave,” explained Swaminathan and Singh.
