Markdown Review opens any Markdown file in your workspace as a rendered document you can comment on. Select a passage, write what should change, repeat for every passage that needs work, then send all of your comments to Kiro at once. Kiro revises the file in a chat session, and the review panel re-renders as the file changes.
Use it when a document is the deliverable: a spec, a design note, a README, or a runbook. Instead of describing each change in chat, you point at the exact text and say what is wrong with it.
Markdown Review works for any .md file inside a workspace folder. Open it from wherever you are:
.kiro/specs show a floating Review button. Requirements, design, and bugfix documents open in Spec mode. Behavior documents open as general Markdown with only that file attached. Tasks documents do not have this button; open them from the Specs view or editor title bar. If the panel cannot open, Kiro opens the standard Markdown preview instead.The panel opens in the active editor group with a Review badge in its header. This badge distinguishes it from the read-only Markdown preview.
While Kiro works, the button reads Kiro is reviewing... and you cannot send again. Kiro's progress, any approvals it needs, and its final response appear in the chat session that received the comments (see Where comments go). When the turn succeeds, the panel clears the comments you sent and keeps any comment you edited while Kiro was working. If the turn fails, your comments stay in the panel with the error so you can fix the problem and send again.
To change a comment before sending, select it in the Comments panel and edit or remove it. Use the comment icon in the panel header to hide or show the Comments panel. While the panel is hidden, the icon shows how many comments you have.
When the file changes on disk, whether Kiro revised it or you edited it elsewhere, the panel re-renders the document. A comment that is still in the panel but whose passage no longer appears in the document is marked document updated. Read the new text, then remove the stale comment or write a new one against the current passage.
If the file is deleted or can no longer be read, the panel shows an error instead of an empty document.
The panel handles two kinds of document:
requirements.md, design.md, tasks.md, and bugfix.md files at .kiro/specs/<feature>/. The header shows the feature name and document type, and the review runs in Spec mode. Kiro can attach the sibling documents of the same spec as context, so a comment on a design can be answered against the requirements it implements.Each time you send, Kiro delivers the comments to the Kiro chat session you most recently focused. If no Kiro session is active, Kiro creates one and focuses it. The review panel does not own a session: if you switch to another chat session between rounds, the next batch goes to that session. Focus the session you want before you send.
By default, Review Markdown renders the document with the Markdown renderer extensions installed in Kiro, so syntax those extensions add looks the same as in the standard preview. Kiro falls back to its own renderer when extension output cannot be shown safely or when rendering times out.
Documents longer than 500,000 characters are not rendered. The panel shows a message that the document is too large to review.
To always use Kiro's local renderer, turn off this setting:
{ "kiroAgent.markdownReview.extensionRendering": false }
The setting applies to the whole application, not per workspace.
Markdown Review