I’m sure you’ve been there: prompt, prompt, prompt, and you have a working application. It’s fun and feels like magic. But getting it to production requires more. What assumptions did the model make when building it? You guided the agent throughout, but those decisions aren’t documented. Requirements are fuzzy and you can’t tell if the application meets them. You can’t quickly understand how the system is designed and how that design will affect your environment and performance. Sometimes it’s better to take a step back, think through decisions, and you’ll end up with a better application that you can easily maintain. That’s what Kiro helps you do with spec-driven development.
I'm excited to announce Kiro, an AI IDE that helps you deliver from concept to production through a simplified developer experience for working with AI agents. Kiro is great at ‘vibe coding’ but goes way beyond that—Kiro’s strength is getting those prototypes into production systems with features such as specs and hooks.
Kiro specs are artifacts that prove useful anytime you need to think through a feature in-depth, refactor work that needs upfront planning, or when you want to understand the behavior of systems—in short, most things you need to get to production. Requirements are usually uncertain when you start building, which is why developers use specs for planning and clarity. Specs can guide AI agents to a better implementation in the same way.
Kiro hooks act like an experienced developer catching things you miss or completing boilerplate tasks in the background as you work. These event-driven automations trigger an agent to execute a task in the background when you save, create, delete files, or on a manual trigger.
Building with Specs and Hooks
Kiro accelerates the spec workflow by making it more integrated with development. In our example, we have an e-commerce application for selling crafts to which we want to add a review system for users to leave feedback on crafts. Let's walk through the three-step process of building with specs.
The ecommerce app that we are working with
1. From single prompt to requirements
Kiro unpacks requirements from a single prompt—type "Add a review system for products" and it generates user stories for viewing, creating, filtering, and rating reviews. Each user story includes EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation acceptance criteria covering edge cases developers typically handle when building from basic user stories. This makes your prompt assumptions explicit, so you know Kiro is building what you want.
Kiro requirements specs
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