In Kiro We Trust

Two years ago, a surgeon friend came to me with a SaaS idea he wanted us to build together. He had the domain knowledge, I had the cloud background, and we started scoping it out. Backend, frontend, data layer, networking, security, testing, infrastructure. The estimate landed somewhere in the five digits of euros, and we shelved it. Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I prototyped the same idea on my own, using Kiro, for $20 a month. I want to talk more about the application itself in future posts, but the tool deserves its own spotlight. Kiro is built by AWS, lives at kiro.dev, and works as an IDE (VS Code based) or through CLI. While a lot of the conversation around AI coding assistants circles around OpenAI Codes, Claude Code, and Cursor, Kiro holds its own with capabilities that overlap and, in some areas, outperform all of them. Getting an account the better way The official docs point you to installing Kiro and signing up on the website directly. I find a better path: go to your AWS Console, navigate to Amazon Q Developer, and create a sub-account from there. You can manage users, spin up groups if you grow a team later, and use the sign-in URL at the top right of that dashboard whenever Kiro asks you to authenticate. Trust me on this one, it saves headaches down the road. Starting out Once you have Kiro installed and authenticated, open an empty folder as your first project and use the chat box on the right side panel. Pick vibe mode with auto as your model, and ask it to build something small: a single HTML page introducing your favorite musician, or a bash script that organizes your downloads folder. Get a feel for what it can do. Once you are comfortable there, learn how to use Spec mode, which is where Kiro really starts to shine for structured, multi-step features. A couple more things worth bookmarking: promptz.dev is a community cookbook for Kiro configurations and best practices, built by Christian Bonzelet. And Kiro Powers are extensions developed by third parties that plug into your workflow for specific needs. I will keep writing about both Kiro and the SaaS project as they evolve. If you have your own experience with the tool, I would love to hear about it. Read the full post