Kiro: The Least Chaotic AI Dev Experience I’ve Had

I was trying out Kiro today with very low expectations as I already have been spending more than a year with a variety of agentic coding tools extensively. As my previous client was investing heavily into AI Assisted Development, I got the chance to push it to limits to understand enough about it and that was the reason for my low expectations. But Kiro exceeded them.

In a way I kind of felt relieved after using it. Kiro is a tool that is designed for a software engineer or architect unlike the other ones which are trying to be everything to everyone. It’s spec-driven, step by step, works at the detail level.

I tried to build a simple MCP server to track my workouts and wanted to connect it to Claude to use it to track my workout. I gave the initial prompt, chose spec based development and that’s all. It gathered requirements, asked me a lot of questions, then it came up with a design spec, and then finally it came up with a task list (with optional unit and integration test tasks).

I implemented the tasks one by one (of course, I ignored tests!). Connected it to my Claude code and it worked. No manual change needed. No specialised models needed, I just chose Auto for everything. It took around 30 of my 50 Kiro credits free limit.

I felt like this is how AI-Assisted Development should be. The closest I came across is Superpowers plugin from Claude code, but still the task list level of granularity made the actual difference in Kiro.

I had always believed that it’s not about intelligent models, it’s about breaking down your problem so that the mid level models perform it accurately. In fact I had developed a similar workflow when I was using Claude code for a migration project. I used to manually make Claude ask all the questions about the requirements, come up with list of stories, explicitly prompting each task should be doable in a single agentic development session.

Maybe I’m jumping to the conclusion too early without seeing the downsides of Kiro but for now, from whatever I have seen, this seems far less chaotic. Ever since AI based development kicked off, there is a sense of uncertainty, chaos and confusion. Any step towards reducing that seems to be the right step in my opinion. Kiro is one right step ahead.