Amazon CEO Andy Jassy attends the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 9, 2025, in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit said Monday that it has released a preview of Kiro, a program developers can use to write code with help from artificial intelligence.
In a post on X, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kiro “has a chance to transform how developers build software.”
The introduction comes days after Google said it is hiring staffers of AI coding software startup Windsurf as part of a $2.4 billion technology licensing deal. Google said it plans to make its Gemini AI models more useful to software developers.
Amazon and Google are jumping deeper into so-called vibe coding, the process of directing computers to create software with minimal human direction. Microsoft has also bolstered its Visual Studio Code editor with an agent mode for automated software development.
Windsurf competes with Cursor, whose parent company Anysphere was reportedly in talks to raise money earlier this year at a $10 billion valuation. OpenAI looked at acquiring Windsurf and Cursor.
Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of cloud infrastructure, said on the frequently asked questions page of the Kiro website that vibe coding in its current form can be overly complex.
“When implementing a task with vibe coding, it’s difficult to keep track of all the decisions that were made along the way, and document them for your team,” the site says. “By using specs, Kiro works alongside you to define requirements, system design, and tasks to be implemented before writing any code.”
Kiro can make diagrams to show how data will flow through a proposed application, and create task lists so people can see what’s missing, Nikhil Swaminathan, product lead at AWS, and Deepak Singh, the group’s vice president of developer experience and agents, wrote in a blog post.
Kiro currently can only chat with people in English. Support for additional languages will come later. The program draws on AI models from Amazon-backed Anthropic, but alternatives will follow, AWS said.
Free and premium tiers of Kiro will be available after the preview ends. Content from paying users won’t be used to train models, and free users can opt out, AWS said.
