The agentic IDE space has gotten crowded fast. Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf — they all share the same core model: you type a prompt, the AI writes some code, you iterate. It works well for prototyping. It breaks down when you're building production systems on a large codebase with a team of more than one. AWS Kiro takes a different bet. Instead of chat-first, it's spec-first . The unit of work isn't a prompt — it's a structured specification that the agent uses to plan, implement, verify, and document your feature end to end. That's a meaningful philosophical difference, and in practice it changes what the tool is useful for. Here's what Kiro actually is, how its core concepts fit together, and an honest take on when it makes sense over the alternatives. What Kiro Is Kiro launched from AWS in mid-2025 and is built on top of Amazon Bedrock, routing between Claude Sonnet for reasoning-heavy work and Amazon Nova for high-throughput code generation.…