Mastering Kiro

AWS killed Amazon Q Developer Pro and replaced it with Kiro — an AI IDE built on a radically different philosophy: write the spec first, then let AI generate the code.

While Cursor and Copilot jump straight to code generation, Kiro writes formal requirements with acceptance criteria before touching a single line. The result: code that matches what you actually wanted, not what the AI guessed you meant.

This book is the definitive guide:

- Why Kiro's spec-driven approach changes everything — and how it differs from Cursor, Copilot, and Claude Code

- Installation and setup: migrate from VS Code or Amazon Q in minutes

- Your first spec-driven project: the describe → spec → code workflow, hands-on

- Specs and requirements: formal acceptance criteria that drive code generation

- AI agents: dozens of specialized agents that investigate your codebase and modify code autonomously

- Hooks and automation: lifecycle hooks that auto-sync docs, generate tests, validate schemas

- Skills and steering rules: customizing AI behavior per project, enforcing coding standards

- MCP integrations: connecting Kiro to databases, AWS services, project management tools

- Working with large codebases: indexing, semantic search, refactoring at enterprise scale

- Testing and debugging: TDD with spec-driven development, test generation from acceptance criteria

- CI/CD and AWS integration: Lambda, CDK, ECS — deep AWS-native deployment pipelines

- Team workflows: shared specs, collaborative development, spec-driven code review

- Honest comparison: Kiro vs Cursor vs Claude Code vs Copilot — when to use each

- Migration guide: step-by-step from Amazon Q, VS Code, or Cursor

14 chapters with real spec examples, agent workflows, hook configurations, and AWS deployment patterns.

If you've been writing code first and documenting later, Kiro inverts that — and this book shows you why that's better.