Amazon (AMZN, Financials) is stepping deeper into the AI software game; on Monday, its cloud division rolled out a preview of Kiro—an AI-powered tool aimed at helping developers code, design systems, and manage tasks with minimal manual effort.
Kiro is part of the broader “vibe coding” movement—an emerging field where developers delegate much of the software-building process to AI agents. It's a space that's heating up fast; just last week, Google announced it was acquiring talent from startup Windsurf in a $2.4 billion licensing deal to boost its own Gemini developer tools. Microsoft, meanwhile, has been pushing agent mode updates in Visual Studio Code.
Kiro, for now, speaks only English; but more languages are on the roadmap. It's designed to work alongside developers by defining software specs upfront—before a single line of code is written. It also draws on models from Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI lab, though AWS says other options will be integrated later.
AWS product lead Nikhil Swaminathan and VP Deepak Singh say Kiro can automatically diagram data flow and generate collaborative task lists; that's meant to reduce the “cognitive sprawl” developers face when tracking decisions across long development cycles.
The company added that once Kiro is fully released, it will come with both free and paid tiers; and while paying users' content won't be used to train models, free-tier users will have the option to opt out.
CEO Andy Jassy, posting on X, said Kiro “has a chance to transform how developers build software”; that's a bold claim—but in a market where everyone from OpenAI to Cursor is racing to reshape coding itself, Amazon is clearly throwing its full weight into the next phase of AI development.
