Kiro Agent by Default and Chat You Can Stop
0.11.0Kiro Crew 0.11.0 runs new sessions on the Kiro Agent harness unless you chose a harness yourself. Press Escape to stop a turn, fork from a message's menu, and read a transcript that is easier to follow. The sidebar keeps an order you set by hand. The Schedule form sets a time limit and a failure limit per job. A preview turns each mate into a conductor with a worker of its own. Streaming is lighter, and a long list of fixes protects your sessions, your shell, and your updates.
These changes affect new installs, saved settings, or where controls live:
- Kiro Agent is the default harness. An install with no saved harness choice runs new sessions on Kiro Agent. It is listed first in the harness list. A harness you chose, including Kiro CLI, is kept.
- The desktop app no longer bundles Kiro CLI. It ships the Kiro Agent harness it was tested with. It detects a Kiro CLI you installed yourself. The switch between the two now lives in Settings → Developer → Feature Previews.
- The summon hotkey is off on new installs. Turn the system-wide hotkey on in Settings if you want it. An existing install keeps its setting.
- The Usage tab no longer estimates tokens. The Estimated Tokens card and the Est. tokens column are gone. The tab shows the credits the provider reports.
Kiro Agent now ships inside the desktop app, and install.sh can fetch it. New sessions use it unless you chose another harness. Credit usage comes from Crew's own sign-in. Kiro Agent sessions answer input requests from MCP servers. An MCP change applies to a live session in place instead of resetting every chat. In this release agent.kas_persist_mcp_sign_in keeps remote MCP sign-ins across sessions and is off by default. The 0.11.2 patch below turns it on by default.
Press Escape in the composer to stop the running turn. A model you pick while a reply streams takes effect at the turn boundary. Optimize prompt works while a turn runs and can be cancelled. With Settings → Chat → Tail-only Fork on, a message's menu offers Fork with later messages only and Fork with earlier messages. The right-click menu adds Open link in new tab. Tab and Shift+Tab indent and outdent list lines in the composer.
The transcript shows a row when the agent saves a lesson, with a link to Review lessons. It shows thumbnails of the images a read looked at. Consecutive edits to one file merge into one row. Every mid-conversation session reset is marked, and a reply that compaction cut off continues. Settings → Chat → Sessions → Open Sidebar Sessions in a Session Tab opens a clicked session in its own tab. Settings → Chat → Side panel gains Keep Side Panel Open and Pin Summary in Side Panel.
Drop a session between two unpinned rows and the sort switches to Manual, with a Sorted by hand notice and Undo. Under Manual, Alt+Up and Alt+Down move a focused unpinned row. The order and the sort choice live on the gateway, so every browser shows the same list. The sidebar menu's Broadcast message sends one message to many sessions. Settings → Chat names a Default Sidebar Folder for New Chats. The pinned band is labeled while a tag filter narrows the list. A title: prefix limits a session search to titles. Chinese queries are split into words instead of single characters.
The Schedule job form sets a Time limit for a run, 30 minutes by default. It also sets an Auto-pause after N failures in a row limit, where 0 means never. The board says when a job is in failure backoff. A Runs as switch picks a Custom agent or a Mate, and the list can filter by mate. On the command line, kirocrew cron add and update take --auto-pause-after. kirocrew spawn run takes --model, --agent, and --crew, and kirocrew agent create and update take --model. A chat permission prompt accepts a typed reply. A spawn_run task can carry a short label. An app's cron can set strict_schedule to fire exactly on schedule, with no spread.
Turn on Settings → Developer → Feature Previews → Mates. Mate is the name this release uses for a crewmate. Each mate gets its own agent file under ~/.kiro/mates/agents/ and a conductor chat that keeps its notes. A worker session does the hands-on work and follows the mate's Profile. Existing mates move over once at startup, with a notice saying what changed. A stale worker is revived when the mate sends it work, and a worker's report wakes its mate after a restart. An opt-in Heartbeat on the Goals tab wakes a mate every 30, 60, 120, or 240 minutes. The Profile shows its monitor status, and one mate can be imported from a .crewmate file. A mate can build and theme its own Dashboard page and keep its progress there instead of in chat. It can send its weekly report as a printable page. A second per-mate preview lets it request tools its worker lacks through a card. Reopening a mate's chat lands on the last message you read, and older history loads as you scroll up. A mate's direct message also posts a notification. A mate's side-panel documents take inline comments.