AWS is recognizing that most developers don’t work the way Kiro, its Visual Studio Code–based agentic IDE, forces them too — so it’s adding two new software development workflows to Kiro that meet developers where they are: working on existing projects, fixing bugs.
Kiro started out with a vision of helping developers through a process of spec-driven development (SDD): they would specify up-front their intent and their requirements, and Kiro would help them get there.
That’s not the situation that developers find themselves in, though.
“Most of us do not start from a greenfield idea. We start from an existing codebase, a messy bug, or a design we already agreed on,” said Advait Patel, a site reliability engineer at Broadcom. “The new workflows feel like Kiro acknowledging that reality and giving people an easier entry point into the spec approach,” said Patel.
With Kiro’s first new workflow, Design-first, developers can begin from a technical approach they already have in mind, such as an architecture decision or implementation sketch, and have Kiro derive requirements, a design specification, and a task plan from that starting point, Ankit Sharma, senior product manager of agentic AI at AWS, wrote in a blog post.
The Bugfix workflow, on the other hand, is aimed squarely at brownfield development, where engineers are working on refining and maintaining an existing codebase.
Rather than jumping straight to code changes, the Bugfix workflow pushes developers to first document current behavior, expected behavior, and what should remain unchanged, effectively turning debugging into a lightweight spec exercise, Sharma wrote.
The changes respond to feedback from Kiro users who didn’t want to give up the structure of specs, but found the current flow was not flexible enough, said Sharma.
Can fixing bugs increase Kiro’s specs appeal?
Analysts see the change more as a response to competition from rivals such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, which don’t force strict spec-driven norms and are proving popular with developers.
“The workflows are an acknowledgment that developer behavior wins. Spec-driven development is intellectually appealing but culturally heavy. Developers increasingly gravitate toward rapid, conversational workflows because they are quicker and easier to use,” said Stephanie Walter, leader of the AI stack at HyperFrame Research.
The new workflows, Walter added, are a “hybrid” strategy to relax the SDD norms enough to attract developers by allowing them to “ideate first and formalize later”.
Dion Hinchcliffe, VP of the CIO practice at The Futurum Group, though, doesn’t see the new workflows being enough to attract developers as they are more likely to choose coding tools that are built for speed.
That’s something Patel echoed: “Developers are pragmatic. If the tool saves time end to end, they will adopt it.”
Top-down development
Developers aren’t always the ones choosing the tools, though, and some tools may appeal more to managers. That’s the case with Kiro, Hinchcliffe said: It’s more likely to find favor with more disciplined development teams and production use cases where governance and auditability are key.
In fact, the analyst advised CIOs to go align themselves with Kiro’s approach: “For a CIO, if you’re paying for outcomes, ‘fast wrong’ fixes are going to be more expensive. The enterprise question isn’t if the tool is slower, it’s does it measurably reduce change-failure rate and mean-time-to-restore.”
This article first appeared on Infoworld.
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