9 ms·

Developing with Kiro: Amazon's New Agentic IDE

93 points by cebert 1y ago

motbus3 1y ago
I bogged me that it says that he spend loads of time upfront planning but not with cursor. You can do the same with cursor, and on my experience, they are about the same. When they reach certain level of complexity of a medium sized project they start messing up.
- creakingstairs 1y ago
  I agree. It’s just not a fair comparison. But then the article is written by Kino with the author “sprinkling in” sentences, so I guess I can’t really expect much.
iamkonstantin 1y ago
Apart from the UI being more point and click, what does Kiro (or Cursor) add that for example Claude Code's CLI doesn't do? > With Kiro, I spend more time upfront articulating what I want to build, but then I can step back and let it execute This sounds like exactly the kind of exercise one does to /init a project with Claude, define tasks/spec etc.
gbrindisi 1y ago
meta: if you use AI to write articles, don’t have them written so that I’m forced to use AI to summarize them
- amarcheschi 1y ago
  Ai decompressor doing their best again. Seriously, though, the article feels too long imho
- iamsaitam 1y ago
  Better, it should be compulsory for these to lead with a summarized version
- conartist6 1y ago
  Reading the HN comments instead of the article is the best summarizing hack
  - djeastm 1y ago
    I kind of hate the implications of it, but if HN (or someone else) wanted to add value, they could show one-line sentiment analyses of the comments in the HN articles so you can decide what's what without even clicking.
    - conartist6 1y ago
      The reason reading comments is so useful is because it's not one summary but a variety of different, unique reactions (and reactions to reactions). The model I want to train is ME, so a one sentence sentiment analysis offers 0 value to me while a lot of distinct human perspectives are a gold mine. It's kinda like the difference between being able to look at a single picture of a landscape and being able to walk around it.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Ironically there was a tool just the other day that would read HN articles and summarize them.
sqrtc 1y ago
I tried out Kiro last week on quite a gnarly date time parsing problem. I had started with a two hundred-ish word prompt and a few bits of code examples for context to describe the problem. Similar to OP it forced me to stop and think more clearly about the problem I was trying to solve and in the end left my jaw on the floor as I saw it work through the task list. I think only early bit of feedback I had was in that my tasks were also writing a lot of tests, and if the feedback loop to getting test results was neater this would be insanely powerful. Something like a sandboxed terminal, I am less keen on a YOLO mode and had to keep authorising the terminal to run.
- jon-wood 1y ago
  This sort of comment always fascinates me. Having a machine do the last leaps for you is a time saver I guess, but I often wonder whether the real thing people are discovering again is that sitting down and really thinking about the problem you're trying to solve before writing some code results in better solutions when you get to it.
  - kubb 1y ago
    They wouldn’t have thought more deeply about it if the model didn’t „tell” them to.
  - 8note 1y ago
    its not that i havent spent time thinking about it - i at least still my thinking first mostly on paper. the LLM however asks me clarifying questions that i wouldnt have thought about myself. the thinking is a step or two deeper than it was before, if the LLM comes up with good questions
hansmayer 1y ago
> This long (hopefully substantial) blog post was written collaboratively, with Kiro handling the bulk of the content generation while I focused on steering the direction. So Kiro wrote whatever Kiro "decided", better said, guessed, what to write about and did most of the "content generation" - a weird but fitting term to use by a machine in writing a fake human blog. And the human kind of "directed it", but we dont really know for sure, because language is our primary interface and an author should be able to express their thoughts without using a machine? I'd happier if the author shared their actual experience in writing the software with this tool.
- ako 1y ago
  Why does it matter, as long as the output is of high quality? E.g., a Spielberg directed movie indicates a level of quality, even if Spielberg didn't do everything himself.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    Bullshit is what we call it when a speaker wants to look good saying something but doesn't care if what they say is true. It's a focus on form over content.
    - ako 1y ago
      You’re making assumptions that aren’t grounded in facts, you do not know if they didn’t care, and if the blog contains fiction. He may have checked and corrected every single line created by the ai.
      - conartist6 1y ago
        I was only responding to a philosophical question about what's problematic about putting someone else's work under your own name, not making an accusation. To respond to you though, yes that is possible, but anyone who put in that level is work is highly unlikely to credit the AI as a writer. And anyway, I had (and have) a choice. Plenty of people are still using their own words and have (or are building) confidence in their own voice, so those are the people I seek out because by giving them support I help make the world I want to live in
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Very good write up. This is indeed a qualitative change in the work of software engineering. What they’re describing can also be done with Claude Code, and it’s way too broad in scope to get any benefit at all from approving code before it’s written. These tools are the way for now. Cursor is in my opinion not geared for this level of hands-off.
Semaphor 1y ago
Been using it for a while, now all other tools feel lacking. The multistep process with manual refinement options after every step just works so much better for keeping LLMs in line. The only times I’ve used anything but kiro since, has been when the Sonnet 4.0 was once again overloaded (tried it with 3.7 for a bit, but it went way off the rails of kiro’s tasks structure every time).
danr4 1y ago
Crtl + F -> "Claude Code" -> No Results -> Close tab Can't really get value out reading this if you don't compare it to the leading coding agent
- redhale 1y ago
  Agree. I stopped reading after the blurb below because it tells me this person has not actually even used Copilot or Cursor to a serious degree. This is an AI-written sentence that seems fine, but is actually complete nonsense. > Each tool has carved out its own niche in the development workflow: Copilot excels at enhancing your typing speed with intelligent code completion, Cursor at debugging and helping you implement discrete tasks well, and recently pushing more into agentic territory. Cursor's autocomplete blows Copilot's out of the water. And both Copilot and Cursor have pretty capable agents. Plus, Claude Code isn't even mentioned here. This blog post is a Kiro advertisement, not a serious comparative analysis.
- brunooliv 1y ago
  I think a big reason why Claude Code is winning is because it’s such a thin wrapper over a very strong base model which is why people are afraid of comparing it directly. All these IDE integrations and GUIs and super complex system prompts etc are only bloating all these other solutions with extra complexity, so comparing something inherently different becomes also harder.
- ofrzeta 1y ago
  Kiro uses Claude Sonnet 4.0 if that matters.
- christophilus 1y ago
  Outside of its excellent capabilities, the thing I most love about Claude Code is that I can run it in my containers. I don’t want Cursor or other bloated, dependency-ridden, high-profile security targets on my desktop.
999900000999 1y ago
Kiro’s main advantage is Amazon is paying for my LLM usage instead of me. For the most part it’s unlimited right now. Vs Code’s Copilot Agent mode is basically the same thing , tell it to write a list of tasks , but I have to pay for it. I’m much happier with both of these options, both are much cheaper than Claude Code. IMO the real race is to get LLM cost down. Someone smarter than me is going to figure out how to run a top LLM model for next to nothing. This person will be a billionaire. Nvidia and AMD are probably already working on it. I want Deepseek running on a 100$ computer that uses a nominal amount of power.
- brokegrammer 1y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Inference should be dirt cheap for LLMs to truly become powerful. It's similar to how computing used to be restricted to mega corps 100 years ago, but today, a smartphone has more computing power than any old age mainframe. Today we need Elon Musk to buy 5 million GPUs to train a model. Tomorrow, we should be able to train a top of the line model using a budget RTX card.
  - 999900000999 1y ago
    Tbh, if the model is small enough you can train locally. I don't need my code assistant to be an expert on Greek myths. The future is probably highly specialized mini llms. I might train a model to code my way. I'm not that smart enough to figure this out, but the solution can't be to just brute force training with more gpus. There is another answer.
glietu 1y ago
Spec based development is a game changer for people with non-coding background to work on side-projects. I’m using this to fork a design flow I use for analog/RFIC design, and I can finally mend together open-source CAD tools to attune to the design flow, that I’d otherwise use in segregation.
lvl155 1y ago
I am just gonna say it. This is not something Kiro came up with. People were already using this workflow. Perhaps they should’ve added more features instead of spending time making promo videos of themselves. I fail to see any add value here especially considering it’s Amazon. Sonnet 4 is effectively unlimited for many MAX users so giving that away to work out their list of bugs is a non-starter.
Cu3PO42 1y ago
I wanted a tiny helper tool to display my global keyboard shortcuts for me on macOS. I gave Kiro a short spec and some TypeScript describing the schema of the input data. It wrote around 5000 LOC including tests and they... worked. It didn't look as nice as I would have liked, but I wasn't able to break it. However, 5000 lines was way too much code for such a simple task, the solution was over-engineered along every possible axis. I was able to (manually) get it down to ~800LOC without losing any important functionality.
- thr0w 1y ago
  > I was able to (manually) get it down to ~800LOC without losing any important functionality. This is funny. Why would you a) care how many LOC it generated and b) bother injecting tedious, manual process into something otherwise fully automated?
  - Cu3PO42 1y ago
    I care about the complexity because I want/need to maintain the code down the line. I find it much easier to maintain shorter, simpler code than long, complex code. Also because it was an experiment. I wanted to see how it would do and how reasonable the code it wrote was.
    - x187463 1y ago
      I'm sure somebody is going to point out that it was written by AI and is a toy, therefore it can be maintained by AI. I share your desire to have human maintainable code, but I imagine one of the goals of AI written code is to allow the AI to manage it, end-to-end.
      - dalmo3 1y ago
        > one of the goals of AI written code is to allow the AI to manage Another reason to favour shorter code.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
evertedsphere 1y ago
at this point i think we ought to start having a tag in the submission title for when the submission is (primarily) llm-generated, like we do for video/pdf/nsfw
- dalmo3 1y ago
  Too late. YouTube music channels already began explicitly tagging videos as "Human made music".
adamgordonbell 1y ago
So with Kiro, you iterate on a spec and a task list as the key activity? It sounds like a very PM type approach to coding. Does that mean it fits PM types more than IC dev types?
- mdaniel 1y ago
  I believe that's why some software engineers dread this new future, because it's no longer software but rather project management and code review, pretty much all day I personally find code review more exhausting than code writing, and that goes 50x for when I'm reviewing code from an intern because they are trying to cheat me all the time. And I have always hated PM stuff, on both sides of that relationship
jgb1984 1y ago
I'm long on no-AI becoming a label of quality, a badge of honor, as people are more exposed to the slop LLMs forces upon them. I want prose, music, photography and movies made by humans, for humans. I want to use software built by developers. The last part in particular because I've seen my share of bug riddled code spewed by the LLM du jour, I'm convinced our industry is vibecoding itself into the abyss.
agrippanux 1y ago
From the article: > What I found interesting is how it forced me to think differently about the development process itself. Instead of jumping straight into code, I found myself spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices. This is what I already do with Claude Code. Case in point, I spent 2.5 hours yesterday planning a new feature - first working with an agent to build out the plan, then 4 cycles of having that agent spit out a prompt for another agent to critique the plan and integrate the feedback. In the end, once I got a clean bill of health on the plan from the “crusty-senior-architect” agent, I had Claude build it - took 12 minutes. Two passes of the senior-architect and crusty-senior-architect debating how good the code quality was / fixing a few minor issues and the exercise was complete. The new feature worked flawlessly. It took a shade over 3 hours to implement what would have taken me 2 days by myself. I have been doing this workflow a while, but Claude Code released Agents yesterday (/agents) and I highly recommend them. You can define an agent on the basis of another agent, so crusty-architect is a clone of my senior-architect but it’s never happy unless code was super simple, maintainable, and uses well established patterns. The debates between the two remind me of sitting in conf rooms hashing an issue out with a good team.
- ofrzeta 1y ago
  How exactly to you "create an agent" with the personalities you are talking about?
  - therealbilliam 1y ago
    /agents
    - ofrzeta 1y ago
      The parent commenter had agents with personalities before the release of the agents feature in Claude Code, that's why I was asking.
      - sunnybeetroot 1y ago
sgt101 1y ago
Super interesting that no one here has mentioned replit. I found the experience of using Kiro and replit really similar with one important difference: replit mostly worked. Kiro tore off and wrote tonnes of code and tests. It asked me to peck at approval requests (one thing I liked was the regexp type trust this tool to do this requests) it spent half a day creating an app to do what I asked... and it was incomprehensible bullshit. I couldn't do anything with the project and I have not touched it since. Replit was a bit more interactive, but pretty autonomous, and it got me to 90% of the solution and then stalled out - wouldn't correct some of the problems I identified to it. About 2 hrs with Cursor sorted that out though. I did use Cursor to do it "AI assisted" and that took about the same amount of time. The advantage is that I really do know whats going on in the code base, but the Replit + Cursor solution is actually better in the sense that it looks better, and works better because the agent did some bits a bit more nicely than I did with Cursor - so I got those ideas for free. Anyway : Hand coding = a walk through the wilderness Cursor = motor cross scrambler bike up the mountain Replit = a helicopter ride to somewhere higher up the mountain selected at random that you didn't know about but now you have to get to the peak by yourself buddy, good luck Kiro = you are blindfolded in a container of some sort and it's moving.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  relevant: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119 - July, 2025 (53 comments)
  - sgt101 1y ago
    It's strange because I used replit in an online container and then had to download the code to carry on editing it - so I don't know how it managed to do that! Anyway, it sounds like they were crazy giving the keys to prod...
konart 1y ago
> What I found interesting is how it forced me to think differently about the development process itself. > Instead of jumping straight into code, I found myself spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices. I don't want to sound rude, but isn't this is something that happens to you with experience after some years? How can you even be a senior developer without "spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices"?
jeffrallen 1y ago
I use https://sketch.dev https://sketch.dev, which seems to be approximately the same kind of thing. I find it is very organized, it does not need nearly as much babysitting as this guy is talking about. Perhaps a difference is the "todo read" and "todo write" tools, which it uses to break the main goal into achievable tasks, and then judge itself on if it has finished correctly or not. Also, Sketch is easy-going with corrections: if you tell it that it went the wrong direction, it quickly adjusts and follows your direction. Anyway, two big thumbs up for agentic dev workflows from me, but only so far with Sketch.

93 points by cebert 1y ago

I bogged me that it says that he spend loads of time upfront planning but not with cursor. You can do the same with cursor, and on my experience, they are about the same. When they reach certain level of complexity of a medium sized project they start messing up.

creakingstairs 1y ago
I agree. It’s just not a fair comparison. But then the article is written by Kino with the author “sprinkling in” sentences, so I guess I can’t really expect much.

iamkonstantin 1y ago

Apart from the UI being more point and click, what does Kiro (or Cursor) add that for example Claude Code's CLI doesn't do? > With Kiro, I spend more time upfront articulating what I want to build, but then I can step back and let it execute This sounds like exactly the kind of exercise one does to /init a project with Claude, define tasks/spec etc.

gbrindisi 1y ago

meta: if you use AI to write articles, don’t have them written so that I’m forced to use AI to summarize them

amarcheschi 1y ago
Ai decompressor doing their best again. Seriously, though, the article feels too long imho
iamsaitam 1y ago
Better, it should be compulsory for these to lead with a summarized version
conartist6 1y ago
Reading the HN comments instead of the article is the best summarizing hack
- djeastm 1y ago
  I kind of hate the implications of it, but if HN (or someone else) wanted to add value, they could show one-line sentiment analyses of the comments in the HN articles so you can decide what's what without even clicking.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    The reason reading comments is so useful is because it's not one summary but a variety of different, unique reactions (and reactions to reactions). The model I want to train is ME, so a one sentence sentiment analysis offers 0 value to me while a lot of distinct human perspectives are a gold mine. It's kinda like the difference between being able to look at a single picture of a landscape and being able to walk around it.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Ironically there was a tool just the other day that would read HN articles and summarize them.

sqrtc 1y ago

I tried out Kiro last week on quite a gnarly date time parsing problem. I had started with a two hundred-ish word prompt and a few bits of code examples for context to describe the problem. Similar to OP it forced me to stop and think more clearly about the problem I was trying to solve and in the end left my jaw on the floor as I saw it work through the task list. I think only early bit of feedback I had was in that my tasks were also writing a lot of tests, and if the feedback loop to getting test results was neater this would be insanely powerful. Something like a sandboxed terminal, I am less keen on a YOLO mode and had to keep authorising the terminal to run.

jon-wood 1y ago
This sort of comment always fascinates me. Having a machine do the last leaps for you is a time saver I guess, but I often wonder whether the real thing people are discovering again is that sitting down and really thinking about the problem you're trying to solve before writing some code results in better solutions when you get to it.
- kubb 1y ago
  They wouldn’t have thought more deeply about it if the model didn’t „tell” them to.
- 8note 1y ago
  its not that i havent spent time thinking about it - i at least still my thinking first mostly on paper. the LLM however asks me clarifying questions that i wouldnt have thought about myself. the thinking is a step or two deeper than it was before, if the LLM comes up with good questions

hansmayer 1y ago

> This long (hopefully substantial) blog post was written collaboratively, with Kiro handling the bulk of the content generation while I focused on steering the direction. So Kiro wrote whatever Kiro "decided", better said, guessed, what to write about and did most of the "content generation" - a weird but fitting term to use by a machine in writing a fake human blog. And the human kind of "directed it", but we dont really know for sure, because language is our primary interface and an author should be able to express their thoughts without using a machine? I'd happier if the author shared their actual experience in writing the software with this tool.

ako 1y ago
Why does it matter, as long as the output is of high quality? E.g., a Spielberg directed movie indicates a level of quality, even if Spielberg didn't do everything himself.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Bullshit is what we call it when a speaker wants to look good saying something but doesn't care if what they say is true. It's a focus on form over content.
  - ako 1y ago
    You’re making assumptions that aren’t grounded in facts, you do not know if they didn’t care, and if the blog contains fiction. He may have checked and corrected every single line created by the ai.
    - conartist6 1y ago
      I was only responding to a philosophical question about what's problematic about putting someone else's work under your own name, not making an accusation. To respond to you though, yes that is possible, but anyone who put in that level is work is highly unlikely to credit the AI as a writer. And anyway, I had (and have) a choice. Plenty of people are still using their own words and have (or are building) confidence in their own voice, so those are the people I seek out because by giving them support I help make the world I want to live in

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Very good write up. This is indeed a qualitative change in the work of software engineering. What they’re describing can also be done with Claude Code, and it’s way too broad in scope to get any benefit at all from approving code before it’s written. These tools are the way for now. Cursor is in my opinion not geared for this level of hands-off.

Semaphor 1y ago

Been using it for a while, now all other tools feel lacking. The multistep process with manual refinement options after every step just works so much better for keeping LLMs in line. The only times I’ve used anything but kiro since, has been when the Sonnet 4.0 was once again overloaded (tried it with 3.7 for a bit, but it went way off the rails of kiro’s tasks structure every time).

danr4 1y ago

Crtl + F -> "Claude Code" -> No Results -> Close tab Can't really get value out reading this if you don't compare it to the leading coding agent

redhale 1y ago
Agree. I stopped reading after the blurb below because it tells me this person has not actually even used Copilot or Cursor to a serious degree. This is an AI-written sentence that seems fine, but is actually complete nonsense. > Each tool has carved out its own niche in the development workflow: Copilot excels at enhancing your typing speed with intelligent code completion, Cursor at debugging and helping you implement discrete tasks well, and recently pushing more into agentic territory. Cursor's autocomplete blows Copilot's out of the water. And both Copilot and Cursor have pretty capable agents. Plus, Claude Code isn't even mentioned here. This blog post is a Kiro advertisement, not a serious comparative analysis.
brunooliv 1y ago
I think a big reason why Claude Code is winning is because it’s such a thin wrapper over a very strong base model which is why people are afraid of comparing it directly. All these IDE integrations and GUIs and super complex system prompts etc are only bloating all these other solutions with extra complexity, so comparing something inherently different becomes also harder.
ofrzeta 1y ago
Kiro uses Claude Sonnet 4.0 if that matters.
christophilus 1y ago
Outside of its excellent capabilities, the thing I most love about Claude Code is that I can run it in my containers. I don’t want Cursor or other bloated, dependency-ridden, high-profile security targets on my desktop.

999900000999 1y ago

Kiro’s main advantage is Amazon is paying for my LLM usage instead of me. For the most part it’s unlimited right now. Vs Code’s Copilot Agent mode is basically the same thing , tell it to write a list of tasks , but I have to pay for it. I’m much happier with both of these options, both are much cheaper than Claude Code. IMO the real race is to get LLM cost down. Someone smarter than me is going to figure out how to run a top LLM model for next to nothing. This person will be a billionaire. Nvidia and AMD are probably already working on it. I want Deepseek running on a 100$ computer that uses a nominal amount of power.

brokegrammer 1y ago
My thoughts exactly. Inference should be dirt cheap for LLMs to truly become powerful. It's similar to how computing used to be restricted to mega corps 100 years ago, but today, a smartphone has more computing power than any old age mainframe. Today we need Elon Musk to buy 5 million GPUs to train a model. Tomorrow, we should be able to train a top of the line model using a budget RTX card.
- 999900000999 1y ago
  Tbh, if the model is small enough you can train locally. I don't need my code assistant to be an expert on Greek myths. The future is probably highly specialized mini llms. I might train a model to code my way. I'm not that smart enough to figure this out, but the solution can't be to just brute force training with more gpus. There is another answer.

glietu 1y ago

Spec based development is a game changer for people with non-coding background to work on side-projects. I’m using this to fork a design flow I use for analog/RFIC design, and I can finally mend together open-source CAD tools to attune to the design flow, that I’d otherwise use in segregation.

lvl155 1y ago

I am just gonna say it. This is not something Kiro came up with. People were already using this workflow. Perhaps they should’ve added more features instead of spending time making promo videos of themselves. I fail to see any add value here especially considering it’s Amazon. Sonnet 4 is effectively unlimited for many MAX users so giving that away to work out their list of bugs is a non-starter.

Cu3PO42 1y ago

I wanted a tiny helper tool to display my global keyboard shortcuts for me on macOS. I gave Kiro a short spec and some TypeScript describing the schema of the input data. It wrote around 5000 LOC including tests and they... worked. It didn't look as nice as I would have liked, but I wasn't able to break it. However, 5000 lines was way too much code for such a simple task, the solution was over-engineered along every possible axis. I was able to (manually) get it down to ~800LOC without losing any important functionality.

thr0w 1y ago
> I was able to (manually) get it down to ~800LOC without losing any important functionality. This is funny. Why would you a) care how many LOC it generated and b) bother injecting tedious, manual process into something otherwise fully automated?
- Cu3PO42 1y ago
  I care about the complexity because I want/need to maintain the code down the line. I find it much easier to maintain shorter, simpler code than long, complex code. Also because it was an experiment. I wanted to see how it would do and how reasonable the code it wrote was.
  - x187463 1y ago
    I'm sure somebody is going to point out that it was written by AI and is a toy, therefore it can be maintained by AI. I share your desire to have human maintainable code, but I imagine one of the goals of AI written code is to allow the AI to manage it, end-to-end.
    - dalmo3 1y ago
      > one of the goals of AI written code is to allow the AI to manage Another reason to favour shorter code.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

evertedsphere 1y ago

at this point i think we ought to start having a tag in the submission title for when the submission is (primarily) llm-generated, like we do for video/pdf/nsfw

dalmo3 1y ago
Too late. YouTube music channels already began explicitly tagging videos as "Human made music".

adamgordonbell 1y ago

So with Kiro, you iterate on a spec and a task list as the key activity? It sounds like a very PM type approach to coding. Does that mean it fits PM types more than IC dev types?

mdaniel 1y ago
I believe that's why some software engineers dread this new future, because it's no longer software but rather project management and code review, pretty much all day I personally find code review more exhausting than code writing, and that goes 50x for when I'm reviewing code from an intern because they are trying to cheat me all the time. And I have always hated PM stuff, on both sides of that relationship

jgb1984 1y ago

I'm long on no-AI becoming a label of quality, a badge of honor, as people are more exposed to the slop LLMs forces upon them. I want prose, music, photography and movies made by humans, for humans. I want to use software built by developers. The last part in particular because I've seen my share of bug riddled code spewed by the LLM du jour, I'm convinced our industry is vibecoding itself into the abyss.

agrippanux 1y ago

From the article: > What I found interesting is how it forced me to think differently about the development process itself. Instead of jumping straight into code, I found myself spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices. This is what I already do with Claude Code. Case in point, I spent 2.5 hours yesterday planning a new feature - first working with an agent to build out the plan, then 4 cycles of having that agent spit out a prompt for another agent to critique the plan and integrate the feedback. In the end, once I got a clean bill of health on the plan from the “crusty-senior-architect” agent, I had Claude build it - took 12 minutes. Two passes of the senior-architect and crusty-senior-architect debating how good the code quality was / fixing a few minor issues and the exercise was complete. The new feature worked flawlessly. It took a shade over 3 hours to implement what would have taken me 2 days by myself. I have been doing this workflow a while, but Claude Code released Agents yesterday (/agents) and I highly recommend them. You can define an agent on the basis of another agent, so crusty-architect is a clone of my senior-architect but it’s never happy unless code was super simple, maintainable, and uses well established patterns. The debates between the two remind me of sitting in conf rooms hashing an issue out with a good team.

ofrzeta 1y ago
How exactly to you "create an agent" with the personalities you are talking about?
- therealbilliam 1y ago
  /agents
  - ofrzeta 1y ago
    The parent commenter had agents with personalities before the release of the agents feature in Claude Code, that's why I was asking.
    - sunnybeetroot 1y ago

sgt101 1y ago

Super interesting that no one here has mentioned replit. I found the experience of using Kiro and replit really similar with one important difference: replit mostly worked. Kiro tore off and wrote tonnes of code and tests. It asked me to peck at approval requests (one thing I liked was the regexp type trust this tool to do this requests) it spent half a day creating an app to do what I asked... and it was incomprehensible bullshit. I couldn't do anything with the project and I have not touched it since. Replit was a bit more interactive, but pretty autonomous, and it got me to 90% of the solution and then stalled out - wouldn't correct some of the problems I identified to it. About 2 hrs with Cursor sorted that out though. I did use Cursor to do it "AI assisted" and that took about the same amount of time. The advantage is that I really do know whats going on in the code base, but the Replit + Cursor solution is actually better in the sense that it looks better, and works better because the agent did some bits a bit more nicely than I did with Cursor - so I got those ideas for free. Anyway : Hand coding = a walk through the wilderness Cursor = motor cross scrambler bike up the mountain Replit = a helicopter ride to somewhere higher up the mountain selected at random that you didn't know about but now you have to get to the peak by yourself buddy, good luck Kiro = you are blindfolded in a container of some sort and it's moving.

mdaniel 1y ago
relevant: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119 - July, 2025 (53 comments)
- sgt101 1y ago
  It's strange because I used replit in an online container and then had to download the code to carry on editing it - so I don't know how it managed to do that! Anyway, it sounds like they were crazy giving the keys to prod...

konart 1y ago

> What I found interesting is how it forced me to think differently about the development process itself. > Instead of jumping straight into code, I found myself spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices. I don't want to sound rude, but isn't this is something that happens to you with experience after some years? How can you even be a senior developer without "spending more time articulating what I actually wanted to build and high level software architectural choices"?

jeffrallen 1y ago

I use https://sketch.dev https://sketch.dev, which seems to be approximately the same kind of thing. I find it is very organized, it does not need nearly as much babysitting as this guy is talking about. Perhaps a difference is the "todo read" and "todo write" tools, which it uses to break the main goal into achievable tasks, and then judge itself on if it has finished correctly or not. Also, Sketch is easy-going with corrections: if you tell it that it went the wrong direction, it quickly adjusts and follows your direction. Anyway, two big thumbs up for agentic dev workflows from me, but only so far with Sketch.