Kiro Review: A Comprehensive Analysis of Spec-Driven Agentic IDEs

1. What is Kiro

Kiro is a spec-driven agentic IDE that transforms natural language ideas into requirements, designs, and tasks, and generates and verifies code by intelligent agents. The goal is to go from prototype to go-live quality quickly.

2. Core competency

1. Specs: Structurally generate requirements, design, and acceptance standards to reduce rework.
2. Steering: Write team specifications and directory structures into projects to make agent execution more consistent.
3. Agent Hooks: Listen for events such as saving, creating, and deleting, and automatically generate tests, update documents, and perform security checks.
4. MCP: Connect external tools and data sources through the Model Context Protocol, and pull documents, repositories, and APIs into the IDE context.
5. Code Awareness and Diff Review: Each step of modification is visible and rollback.

3. Applicable people and value

1. Small and medium-sized teams and start-ups: Stable delivery of functions under limited manpower.
2. Large codebase developers: Reduce risk in refactoring and cross-module transformation.
3. Technical leader: Solidify the specification to the tool layer to reduce the cost of team collaboration.

4.

1. When adding cross-layer functions (login, payment, comment, etc.) in typical scenarios, it becomes a spec and then implements it according to the task list.
2. Automatically generate or update single tests when saving components; Complete documents and change records before merging.
3. Evaluate the impact surface before refactoring, and the diff can be seen and rolled back during execution.

5. Quickly get started

1. with installation and login (supports GitHub, Google, and AWS identities).
2. Generate Steering documentation that complements the table of contents and naming conventions.
3. Create your first spec in natural language, execute tasks, and review diffs.
4. Enable Hooks to "save and test, change and synchronize documents".
5. Connect to the MCP server and connect GitHub, documentation repositories, or self-built tools.

6. Different from similar

1. types to plan first and then implement to reduce the confusion of the temporary splicing process.
2. Closed-loop planning, execution, review, and automation reduce context loss.
3. Based on Code OSS, it follows VS Code habits and plugin ecosystem.

7. Price and Edition (August 2025)

1. The current public preview is free to use with a limit.
2. Free, Pro (about $20/month), Pro+ (about $40/month), and Power (about $200/month) will be available soon, counted by Vibe/Spec requests.
3. You can support over-pay-per-use billing without having to force a tier upgrade.

8. Selection suggestions

Regard Kiro as "a paired programmer who can write documents, understand architecture, and can execute". First, choose a cross-layer requirement to run through the closed loop of "specification-implementation-verification-automation", and then decide whether to promote it fully by the team.