History of Kiro

Kiro went from a surprise AWS preview in July 2025 to a five-surface platform in about fourteen months. This chapter is the dated timeline, so you can tell at a glance whether a tutorial you found is describing today’s Kiro or a version two rewrites ago.

Why a history chapter at all?

Two practical reasons. First, you will meet older tutorials and videos that show different commands, names, or pricing. Knowing the timeline tells you instantly whether advice is outdated. Second, Kiro’s story explains its shape: it merged a popular terminal tool (Amazon Q Developer CLI) with a new spec-driven IDE, which is why the same core concepts appear in both places today.

Timeline

July 14-15, 2025: Public preview. AWS unveiled Kiro at its New York Summit as an agentic IDE built on Code OSS (the open-source foundation of VS Code). It launched with the ideas that still define it: specs, steering, hooks, and MCP support. It was introduced by AWS leaders Nikhil Swaminathan and Deepak Singh.

Late July to August 2025: The waitlist era. Demand exceeded the capacity AWS had provisioned. Within weeks there was a waitlist and daily usage limits, an unusually loud start for a developer tool preview.

November 17, 2025: General availability. The big one. Alongside GA (after 250,000+ preview users), AWS shipped:

• Kiro CLI, announced as “Bring Kiro agents to your terminal”
• Property-based testing: automated checks that your code actually matches your spec
• Checkpointing: restore points so agent work can be rolled back confidently
• Team plans: centralized billing and management

November 24, 2025: Claude Opus 4.5 became available as a model option.

December 2, 2025: the Kiro autonomous agent was introduced.

December 3, 2025: Powers arrived: one-click installable bundles (POWER.md + MCP tools + steering) that teach the agent a specific technology, with launch partners like Stripe, Supabase, Figma, and Datadog.

Late 2025: Q Developer CLI becomes Kiro CLI. Kiro CLI itself debuted at GA (v1.20.0, November 17, 2025) as the official successor to Amazon Q Developer CLI, and existing Q Developer CLI installations were rebranded and upgraded to Kiro CLI in the weeks that followed (more below).

2026: The platform fills out.

• February 5, 2026: Kiro 0.9 brought custom subagents to the IDE, agent skills (following the open agentskills.io standard), enterprise controls, granular code review, and smart refactoring tools.
• February 13, 2026: Claude Sonnet 4.6 joined the model lineup (later upgraded to a 1M-token context). Through spring 2026 the Claude line in Kiro kept growing; by mid-year it spanned Sonnet 4.0/4.5/4.6 and Opus 4.5/4.6/4.7.
• May 18, 2026: Kiro Web launched at app.kiro.dev: cloud agents that work on your GitHub repositories from the browser.
• May 26, 2026: Kiro became a HIPAA-eligible service (IDE and CLI).
• May 29, 2026: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M-token context) joined the model lineup; CLI v2.5 added visible thinking and subagent review loops.
• June 2026: a busy month. Kiro Web gained GitLab support, browser-based specs, and Automations (scheduled recurring tasks that run and open pull requests on a cron). CLI v2.6 added transcript export and persistent model preferences, and CLI V3 early access (v2.8.0, June 17) introduced a unified agent harness shared across the IDE, Web, and CLI, opt-in with kiro-cli --v3. At AWS Summit NYC on June 17, a native iOS app was announced in gated preview, letting developers start sessions, review diffs, and approve changes from their phones.
• June 25, 2026: Kiro IDE 1.0. The 1.0 release added Agent Focus (an experimental chat-first view that runs several agents in parallel), a capability-based permissions system (every file read, command, and MCP call checked against your rules), Markdown-based custom agents, natural-language hook generation, and dockable chat tabs. CLI v2.10.0 (June 26) followed with configuration hot-reload for agent and MCP settings.
• July 1, 2026: Claude Sonnet 5 became available across the IDE, CLI, and Web (1M-token context).
• July 14, 2026: OpenAI GPT-5.6 arrived, the first non-Anthropic models in Kiro: three tiers called Sol (flagship), Terra (balanced), and Luna (fastest). Kiro is no longer a single-vendor platform.
• July 24, 2026: Claude Opus 5 became available: Anthropic’s most capable model, stronger on long-running agentic tasks and multi-agent coordination.
• Late July 2026: a stream of IDE and CLI updates. The IDE gained global hooks (user-level, applying across all workspaces), a searchable session history panel, and an “Ask Kiro to Fix” quick action in the editor context menu. The CLI added /tangent for branching into side-conversations, /upgrade-agent to migrate V2 custom agent configs to the V3 format, and MCP authentication management commands.
• August 4, 2026: Kiro Crew is open-sourced. AWS published Kiro Crew under the Apache 2.0 licence: an always-on personal agent that runs on your own hardware, locally or on a remote host, with subagents, scheduling, memory, and connections to Slack, Discord, Telegram, and more. It picked up coverage from InfoQ, InfoWorld, Forbes, and DevOps.com, and it made Kiro a five-surface product rather than a three-surface one.
• August 7, 2026: IDE v1.0.288. Powers are now packaged in the open Agent Plugin format, installable from local folders or GitHub URLs. Agent Focus Mode gained session pinning and Kiro CLI hand-off.
• August 11-12, 2026: cloud sessions reach the IDE and CLI. The managed AWS sandbox that had been powering Kiro Web and the iOS app opened up to the desktop tools: CLI v2.17.0 added kiro-cli --cloud with resume-from-anywhere, and IDE v1.0.293 put Cloud Sessions inside Agent Focus Mode as a preview. CLI v2.18.0 followed the next day with /voice dictation (transcribed on-device with Whisper), a spec review screen for staging line comments, and an enterprise opt-in switch for cloud sessions.
• August 12-13, 2026: AGENTS.md becomes steering. CLI v2.18.0 and IDE v1.0.309 began loading AGENTS.md files as steering context from anywhere in the workspace tree. It is a quiet but telling change: Kiro now reads the cross-tool instruction file that several competing agents also honor, instead of only its own .kiro/steering/ format.
• August 17, 2026: Kiro Web gains enterprise sign-in. Teams can reach Kiro Web through Okta or Microsoft Entra ID, on Pro and above.
• August 18-19, 2026: reliability work. IDE v1.0.337 kept ignored files out of search results and tightened filesystem and command permission rules. CLI v2.19.0 added automatic recovery from stream failures - an idle watchdog, retries for throttling and dropped connections, and a 60-minute streaming timeout - the kind of change that only matters once agents routinely run for hours.
• August 26-27, 2026: polish on both desktop surfaces. CLI v2.20.0 gave V3 spec runs a full-screen task execution view (/spec run), with the task scope chosen before execution and progress shown live. IDE v1.0.395 made third-party extensions work alongside Kiro, adopted the latest MCP protocol revision with more reliable sign-in, cut extension-host crashes during large agent responses, and kept agent turns alive through brief network drops.
• August 27 and 31, 2026: Kiro Web tidies up. Sessions started getting agent-generated titles, with a manual rename protected from being overwritten, and from August 31 you could choose a repository branch when creating a session.
• September 1, 2026: Kiro Web reaches general availability. The browser surface left preview and became Kiro Web proper, on Pro, Pro+, Pro Max, and Power, with GitHub and GitLab. The same day brought cloud configuration sync: agents, MCP servers, powers, steering, skills, and hooks defined in the cloud now flow down into local sessions as read-only previews, supported by CLI v2.21.0 (a session dashboard covering local and cloud sessions, plus a configuration panel) and IDE v1.0.437 (cloud configuration across IDE surfaces, cloud-synced powers in the installed list). Two administrative items landed alongside: Kiro came under the AWS ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, and usage metrics can now be exported to OpenTelemetry, giving admins per-user adoption and credit consumption.

Kiro and Amazon Q Developer CLI

Before Kiro, Amazon’s AI helper in the terminal was called Amazon Q Developer CLI. Many tutorials, blog posts, and Homebrew formulas still reference it. Here’s the relationship in plain terms:

• Kiro CLI is its successor. In late 2025, AWS folded the Q Developer CLI experience into the Kiro brand as Kiro CLI. The change was an upgrade as much as a rename: it brought Kiro’s primitives (specs, steering, hooks, custom agents, and later skills and powers) to the terminal.
• Old habits keep working. The q and q chat entry points were preserved, so existing scripts didn’t break.
• Configs migrated automatically. Settings moved from ~/.aws/amazonq/ to ~/.kiro/, and the CLI still reads legacy in-project .amazonq folders. AWS published an official “Upgrade to Kiro” guide for the transition.
• Q Developer is winding down, officially. AWS published an end-of-support timeline: new Q Developer signups closed on May 15, 2026, and the IDE plugins and paid subscriptions reach end of support on April 30, 2027, giving teams a twelve-month runway onto Kiro.

How to stay current

Kiro ships changes monthly, sometimes weekly. Two habits keep you accurate:

1. Skim the official changelog (kiro.dev/changelog) when something behaves differently than you expect.
2. Distrust any third-party article older than a few months, including this site. That’s why every chapter here shows a “last reviewed” date and links to official docs.