Amazon Kiro & Amazon Q

Amazon Q Developer began as an AI-powered developer assistant integrated into the AWS ecosystem, offering features like inline code suggestions, security scanning, and agent-based task execution directly inside popular IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains.

Amazon later evolved the product into Kiro, a standalone AI-powered IDE that goes deeper into the development workflow. Kiro introduced concepts like specs, hooks, and steering — structured ways to plan, automate, and guide AI-assisted development across an entire project.

The shift from Amazon Q Developer to Kiro represented a broader vision: moving beyond code completion and into a fully agentic development environment where AI participates in the entire software lifecycle, from requirements to deployment.