Welcome to Kiro Documentation
This documentation provides a comprehensive guide to using Kiro, an AI IDE that helps you deliver from concept to production through a simplified developer experience for working with AI agents.
Overview
Kiro is an agentic IDE that works alongside you from prototype to production. While it excels at 'AI Coding Tools', Kiro's true strength lies in getting those prototypes into production systems through spec-driven development. Kiro bridges the gap between the flow of intuitive coding and the clarity of structured specifications, ensuring your AI-generated code is production-ready.
Key Features
Kiro Specs are artifacts that prove useful anytime you need to think through a feature in-depth, refactor work that needs upfront planning, or when you want to understand the behavior of systems. Specs guide AI agents to better implementations by making prompt assumptions explicit and ensuring clarity in requirements.
Kiro Hooks act like an experienced developer catching things you miss or completing boilerplate tasks in the background as you work. These event-driven automations trigger an agent to execute tasks when you save, create, or delete files, enforcing consistency and quality checks across your entire team.
The Spec-Driven Development Workflow
- From Single Prompt to Requirements: Kiro unpacks requirements from simple prompts, generating detailed user stories with EARS notation acceptance criteria
- Technical Design: Generates design documents by analyzing your codebase, creating data flow diagrams, TypeScript interfaces, and database schemas
- Implementation Tasks: Creates sequenced tasks and sub-tasks with implementation details including tests, loading states, and accessibility requirements
- Quality Assurance: Hooks automatically catch issues, update documentation, and enforce coding standards
Core Capabilities
Beyond specs and hooks, Kiro includes:
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for connecting specialized tools
- Steering Rules to guide AI behavior across your project
- Agentic Chat for ad-hoc coding tasks with file, URL, and document context providers
- VS Code Compatibility - built on Code OSS with support for your existing settings and Open VSX compatible plugins
Getting Started
Kiro is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, supporting most popular programming languages. The platform is free during preview with some limits.
Quick Start
- Download Kiro from kiro.dev
- Sign in with Google, GitHub, or other supported methods
- Follow the hands-on tutorial to build a complete feature from spec to deployment
Navigating the Documentation
This documentation is organized into the following sections:
- How to Use Kiro (TypeScript/JavaScript): How to use Kiro (TypeScript/JavaScript).
- Kiro vs Cursor: How Kiro compares to Cursor.
- Kiro Hooks Guide: How to use Kiro Hooks.