Kiro bots are persistent agents in Kiro Crew. Each bot has its own threads, memory, and workspace. It can track ongoing goals, delegate tasks to workers, and follow up on progress over time.
Use a bot when you want an agent to take ongoing ownership of a goal, rather than just complete a single task.
A bot is designed for work that continues over time. It remembers your goals and preferences, tracks progress, and can proactively work toward your goals. You can check in, adjust priorities, or give new instructions without starting from scratch each time.
Here are some examples:
| Use case | Example goal | How a bot helps |
|---|---|---|
| Contribute to an existing project | Submit one high-quality PR to an open-source project each week. | Explores the repository, identifies contribution opportunities, works on changes, and tracks progress toward the weekly goal. |
| Maintain a bug backlog | Work through assigned critical and high-priority bugs. | Prioritizes issues, investigates root causes, proposes fixes, and keeps track of resolved and outstanding bugs. |
| Improve CI reliability | Reduce flaky tests and improve CI stability. | Investigates intermittent failures, identifies unreliable tests and timing dependencies, proposes fixes, and checks whether changes improve reliability. |
| Monitor system and build health | Keep nightly builds green and monitor application health. | Checks builds and system health regularly, investigates failures or anomalies, and alerts you when attention or a decision is needed. |
Not every task needs a bot. Choose based on how much ongoing context, autonomy, and follow-up your work requires.
| Option | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Bot | You have an ongoing goal and want an agent to take initiative, remember context, and track progress over time. |
| Custom agent | You want reusable instructions, tools, and skills for a specialized task or way of working. |
| Regular chat session | You want to ask questions or work through a task interactively. |
| Scheduled job | You want a predefined task to run at specific times. |
| Subagent or workflow | You want to delegate or automate specific tasks within a session. |
A custom agent defines a reusable configuration. A bot takes ongoing responsibility for goals, with its own memory, workspace, and optional check-ins.
The key difference is ongoing ownership. With a regular chat, you typically drive the work by giving instructions. With a bot, you establish a goal and collaborate with an agent that maintains context and can take initiative toward that goal.
Start with the built-in bot. In a few steps, you can name it, give it a goal, approve milestones, and configure check-ins.
See Set up a bot.
A bot has one persistent conversation with you. Unlike a regular chat session, which you can start independently for each task, a bot keeps the same conversation and its own memory across interactions.
When you return to a bot, you pick up where you left off. You don't need to recreate its context or explain your goals again.
For longer tasks, your bot can delegate work to workers, which run in separate sessions and report their results back to the bot. The bot coordinates the work, maintains the overall context, and keeps you informed of progress.
Each bot also has its own memory and workspace, isolated from other bots. This allows you to create different bots for different goals without mixing their context.
In short: Your bot maintains the ongoing relationship and goal, while worker sessions handle the individual tasks needed to make progress.
See How bots work for details.
Kiro bots