Agent sessions are exploratory. Sometimes the agent heads down the wrong path, or you want to try a different approach without losing what you have. Kiro gives you two distinct ways to go back: checkpoints restore your files to an earlier point in the session, and rewind forks your conversation at an earlier turn.
| Capability | IDE | CLI | Web | Mobile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkpoints - restore files to an earlier point | ✓ | Experimental (v2) | — | — |
| Rewind - fork the conversation at an earlier turn | — | ✓ | — | — |
| Revert the last turn's file changes | ✓ | — | — | — |
The two mechanics solve different problems:
Reach for a checkpoint when you want to undo the agent's work. Reach for rewind when you want to redirect the conversation - for example, to try a different prompt from the same starting point - while keeping the file changes made so far.
Each time you send a prompt to Kiro, it creates a checkpoint. Checkpoints appear as markers in your chat history. Select Restore on a checkpoint marker to rewind both your codebase and Kiro's context back to that point in time. Any changes made to your codebase by Kiro after that checkpoint are reverted, and any context additions (chat interactions) after that point are discarded as well.
Checkpoints act as a safety net that enables you to confidently explore multiple approaches to a problem, try different models for a given task, and recover from mistakes or misunderstandings by the agent.
Checkpoints work by snapshotting the contents of a file each time the Kiro agent modifies it using one of its built-in file modification tools, and then restoring that snapshot when you revert to that checkpoint.
Kiro does not track changes to a file made outside of the Kiro agent. If Kiro snapshots a file and you then manually edit that same file or run a code formatting tool on it, your changes will be lost when you revert to that checkpoint. Kiro also does not track file changes made by MCP tools or bash commands that it runs as part of its execution.
Whenever the Kiro agent modifies one or more files and then completes its turn, you will see an option to Revert the changes made by the agent immediately above the chat input box.
Reverts are similar to checkpoints, but differ in two key aspects. First, reverts only undo changes made by the latest turn of the agent, whereas checkpoints can undo changes made over multiple turns. Second, reverts only revert file changes, whereas checkpoints undo file changes as well as discard context additions past the checkpoint.
Checkpoints and rewind