History of Kiro

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 Knowing the timeline tells you instantly whether advice is outdated.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 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.
• 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: Kiro Web gained GitLab support and browser-based specs; CLI v2.6 added transcript export and persistent model preferences.

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.