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.