Kiro · CLI coding agents · crystl

Kiro: AWS’s Agentic Coding Assistant

Kiro is AWS’s agentic coding assistant for the terminal, part of the Kiro product alongside the Kiro IDE. It is the rebranded successor to Amazon Q Developer CLI: existing Q workflows, subscriptions, and sign-ins carried over when AWS announced the change in November 2025.

Models and Pricing

Kiro defaults to an Auto agent that routes across models, with selectable Claude, GPT, and open-weight options (DeepSeek, Qwen3 Coder, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax), each at its own credit multiplier. Pricing is credit-based and shared across the IDE, CLI, and web: a free tier includes 50 credits a month, and paid plans run $20 to $200/mo with $0.04/credit overage. Bringing your own provider is not documented.

What It’s Good At

Kiro’s signature is spec-driven development: requirements and design files steer the agent instead of one long prompt. Steering files and agent hooks shape behavior per project, MCP and custom agents extend it, and a headless mode with ACP support covers CI/CD pipelines. It also ships a voice mode.

Kiro in Crystl

Kiro runs in a crystl shard with its own model selection and activity visibility. Crystl recognises the agent, names its shards correctly, and tracks its activity, but the deeper surfaces are still unwired: its tool calls raise no approval cards, its sessions have no transcript crystl can read, and resume by id is not available.

A spawned Kiro worker reports done when its process exits rather than on a turn-end hook.

The profile describes what crystl has tested; it never supplies a command, hook script, or launch setting. Those remain local to the Crystl installation.

Community Score

Is Kiro Any Good?

Votes from visitors who have used Kiro, one per category per person. Community opinion, separate from the verified facts above.

Crystl Compatibility

How it runs in crystl:

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