One year of Kiro: a look back, and a look ahead

A year ago today, we introduced Kiro to the world with a simple belief: developers deserve better than vibe coding. They deserve tools that help them think clearly, build confidently, and ship production-ready software without trading speed for quality.

What happened next humbled us, occasionally set us (metaphorically) on fire, and made Kiro what it is today. None of it would have happened without you.

When we launched Kiro IDE in preview last July, we knew spec-driven development resonated with how experienced engineers actually work. But we didn't know to what extent the broader developer community would embrace it, and we underestimated you all. More than 100,000 developers tried Kiro IDE within the first 5 days, and demand kept climbing from there. By October, that number had more than doubled. The response was incredible and taught us that you would tell us exactly what you thought, loudly and quickly.

In November, we took Kiro to general availability with a set of capabilities we were proud of. We were the first to bring spec-driven development to AI coding tools, and we doubled down on features that brought even more reliability and rigor. Property-based testing that measures whether your code matches your spec. Checkpointing to rewind agent-made changes. We launched Kiro CLI that bringing agentic development to your terminal. And enterprise features for organizations ready to adopt Kiro at scale.

Since then, the pace has only picked up: remote MCP, global steering files, our Auto agent. Parallel agents that learn across sessions. Multi-root workspace support. GovCloud availability. Powers for extending what Kiro can do, Agent Focus to enable agent-centric building, and new plans with Kiro Pro Max. And a growing roster of models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and open weight models, so you can choose the right model for the job.

We’ve also launched Web and Mobile experiences so you can work with Kiro wherever you are. Every Kiro surface is optimized for a different style of development work: the IDE for hands-on, code-heavy building; the CLI for terminal-native workflows, CI/CD, and DevOps-aligned automation; Web where autonomy and collaborative building is the core experience; and Mobile as a control hub across your cloud sessions, so your phone keeps work moving without locking you to a laptop. With Kiro working from your preferences, rules, and repos across each, you can flex into whichever surface fits how you’re working on any given day.

And among growing roster of models from Anthropic and open weight models, I am excited to share we’ve added OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna models live across the IDE, CLI and Web. These models are tuned for different performance-cost optimizations so you can get the most from your credits: Sol for complex multi-step work, Terra for the standard fare, and Luna for fast and low-cost throughput. With these added to the arsenal we continue to prioritize providing more models to you for more choice as you build.

As we’ve been building Kiro, our community has continued to be our guiding hand, and as a result Kiro developers have been doubling over quarters. The stories we’ve heard from builders this year remind us why we do this work.

Rob Larmon and his two-person cloud team at Loyola Marymount University used Kiro to update 500 Lambda functions across dozens of AWS accounts. A task that previously took two months now takes half a day. Rob told us Kiro feels like having "a three-to-ten-person development team at my fingertips." He’s now running Kiro workshops across campus, training the next generation of builders.

Students have been just as inspiring. Since launching Kiro for students, thousands of students have joined the Kiro community and are receiving 1,000 credits per month free for a year. The next generation of developers is learning to build with intention from day one. Olivia Herneddo, Lead Experience Designer at Arizona State University, worked with our team to bring Kiro into an ASU hackathon, and shared with us the feedback from one hacker that captured the whole thesis of Kiro:

“Kiro made the spec-first approach feel natural rather than bureaucratic. Writing requirements and correctness properties before code meant we always knew what we were building toward, and when we hit an inevitable mid-build pivot, the specs absorbed the change cleanly instead of breaking everything.”

Startups have been equally enthusiastic. When we launched Kiro for startups, thousands of founders applied and demand was so high we had to close applications early. We brought the program back a few months later, so that qualifying early-stage teams can now get a full year’s worth of Kiro Pro+. It’s clear that small teams building fast need structure just as much as large enterprises do.

For one-person startup Just Joe Technologies, Kiro provides affordable access to strong coding help that is not just convenient, but directly affects how much they can ship. Kiro lets Festly, a festival management platform, cross-validate work across their whole ecosystem and extend QA far faster. More than a tool, it’s helped them establish a better workflow with Kiro as a genuine agentic co-worker. Kiro has helped ALO Tech Solutions, a SaaS provider, significantly accelerate development, cutting prototyping and iteration cycles by roughly 30–40%. And, Kiro lets Trailflow Systems move way faster, from weeks to days when building complex logistics features for dispatch, tracking, payroll. These are just some of the stories we’re hearing that motivate us to keep pushing hard.

We’re hearing these stories across enterprises as well. Using Kiro’s AI-powered spec workflow, Siemens completed a production-ready AWS serverless guardrail service featuring authentication, real-time dashboards, and complete infrastructure — a project traditionally requiring 3-4 months with multiple developers — in 2 weeks with a single architect. Kiro has fundamentally changed the development approach at Smugmug and Flickr, and is helping Appian adopt an AI-driven development lifecycle mindset with the ability to prototype and build simplified proofs-of-concept in just hours.

Seeing Kiro adopted across industries, from higher education to aviation to telecommunications, tells us that spec-driven development solves a universal challenge.

This year also marked the beginning of Kiro’s partner collaborations. Since Kiro powers launched with powers from about a dozen partners including Figma, Postman, Stripe, Supabase, and Netlify, our partner offerings and collaborations have grown. Now, we have a repository of 100+ curated powers spanning development lifecycle categories such as frontend development, backend development, CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, and security from our partners.

These powers enhance Kiro’s agentic capabilities on demand by dynamically loading use case-specific best practices, context, and tool connections. In addition to our curated powers, the Kiro community has created more than 15,000 unique powers. We plan to drive Kiro’s evolution by harnessing the complementary strengths of our partners and community.

Nothing has been more energizing than watching the Kiro community grow.

We launched the Kiro Ambassadors program to formalize our relationship with the most engaged developers in the ecosystem. Ambassadors get early access, a direct line to the team building Kiro, and our support as they create content, host events, and support fellow builders.

We opened the Kiro community hub on Kiro.dev, a place to see what the community is building, find resources, connect with other developers, and get hands-on at events. Alongside it, we launched Kiro Labs, a GitHub organization dedicated to open-source projects built by Amazonians with Kiro, for Kiro. From dotkiro (a CLI that keeps your team’s steering files in sync) to custom workflow tools, Labs is where internal experimentation meets the open-source community.

Our Discord community has become a vibrant place for developers to share hooks, custom agent workflows, MCP integrations, and creative projects that push Kiro in directions we hadn’t imagined. Biweekly office hours, hackathons, workshops, and meetups give builders direct access to the Kiro team and to each other. This year alone, we’ve seen our Discord community grow by over a third.

To every developer who filed an issue, submitted a pull request, posted a project to the community showcase, hosted a meetup, tried Kiro on a side project at midnight, or brought it into their team’s workflow: thank you. You shaped Kiro into what it is today. Your feedback made specs more flexible. Your experiments inspired new capabilities. Your frustrations pushed us to fix what needed fixing.

Building developer tools is a privilege. You trust us with your time, your attention, and your craft. We don’t take that lightly.

A year in, we’re just getting started. The problems we set out to solve, helping developers move from intent to production with confidence, are only becoming more important as AI reshapes how software gets built. The pace of what we’re shipping is accelerating, and the roadmap ahead is the most ambitious we’ve ever had.

We’re building Kiro for the long term. For you, and with you.

Happy birthday, Kiro. Here’s to year two.