Changelog Interviews Spec-driven development with Kiro
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Oct 15, 2025 Deepak Singh, leader of the developer agents team at AWS, dives into Kiro, an innovative AI coding environment designed for spec-driven development. He talks about how Kiro transforms the workflow from prototype to production, emphasizing a spec-first mindset that enables developers to architect rather than directly edit code. Deepak contrasts traditional chat-based coding with Kiro's visual IDE approach and discusses the importance of sharing specs and the role of hooks for automation. He also explores Kiro's target users and future challenges in achieving full app automation.
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Design-First Coding Wins
- Developers think by breaking problems into smaller tasks and specs, not by raw typing code.
- Kiro captures that design-first workflow by making specs the primary artifact, with code as agent output.
Senior Engineers Initially Unconvinced
- Senior engineers resisted early AI completions because they preferred to 'type faster' themselves.
- Kiro aimed to make those seniors want to use agents by matching their design and decomposition workflows.
Edit Specs, Not Generated Code
- Write and edit the spec instead of manually editing generated code to keep agent context consistent.
- Use the agent's chain-of-thought and stop early if it goes off-track, then redirect the spec.