From Chat Prompt to Working Software with Kiro

**Amit Patel** (0:00)
If I was to build a very simple app that uploaded files to S3 and allowed me to download them on a different device, it's a simple web app. I can drag and drop a file into the web page, and then it'll be uploaded, and then I can drag and drop it onto my other desktop, and it'll be downloaded. That's a simple app, right? And anyone can go in and say, that's what I want as a feature. It takes knowledge and experience to know that, first of all, you want to protect that bucket with some kind of security, so not random people can't read your files. You may want to think about encryption at rest, which S3 does by default. You may want to think about encryption in transit. You may want to think about certificate exchange and KMS and all of those kind of things. All of that isn't by default the thing you get out of the LLM without you asking for it.

**Darin Pope** (0:46)
This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 345 From chat prompt to working software with Kiro.
Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darin and Victor, pretend we know what we're talking about. Most of the time, we mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like Kubernetes, serverless, CICD, team productivity, islands of happiness and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing. Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there and there is no way we are going to find it. Yes, it's Darin reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Victor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darin Pope and Victor Farsi. On today's show, we're going to be talking with Amit Patel from Kiro. Amit, how are you doing?

**Amit Patel** (1:54)
Hi, Darin. Nice to meet you.

**Darin Pope** (1:56)
Good to meet you as well. Some people may have heard of Kiro, some people may have not. Let me see if I can sort of make a call of what Kiro is when it came to about. And then you can correct me on everything that I completely said wrong. Kiro is under the AWS umbrella. So far, so good, right?

**Amit Patel** (2:17)
Yes, that's correct.

**Darin Pope** (2:18)
OK, it was launched about nine months ago. That was in July of 25

**Amit Patel** (2:23)
Yes.

**Darin Pope** (2:24)
From an early access preview, whatever. But then GA'd somewhere around November-ish 25

**Amit Patel** (2:33)
Yeah, that's right. Around October, November, we did the GA.

**Darin Pope** (2:35)
And the question now is, is it running itself? Why is there any humans actually working on Kiro at this point?

**Amit Patel** (2:43)
That's actually a more general question than just about Kiro. The whole AI development, the way software development is changing is actually super interesting. And even in the short time that we've been building and operating Kiro, things that were happening even 12 months ago have completely transformed to what's happening now. And I suspect in 12 months, it will be different again. I don't think we're quite at the point in the industry where all the humans are going away. I don't think that's actually a desirable state, quite frankly, because the way I'm seeing the current evolution of AI is more about improving the level of abstraction rather than necessarily some way of replacing software developers. So I think what AI has done for people is increase the velocity of software development, increase the quality of software development in many cases. That I think is going to continue to happen and people are going to be more and more productive and build bigger and better things.

**Darin Pope** (3:41)
Now, if you take a look at the about page on Kiro.dev, by the way, if you don't know how to spell Kiro, K-I-R-O.
Think Kiro, but Kiro. It says, it is built and operated by a small opinionated team within AWS. Now, when I think small and opinionated, I think back to my days of startups where it was three or four people in a garage, in a back corner, whatever. But with that extra prepositional phrase added on there of within AWS. Is that prepositional? I don't know. What is a small opinionated team within the confines of AWS? To me, is that 10,000 or?

**Amit Patel** (4:21)
I don't think there's any. Maybe there's one or two teams that might be that big, but certainly not my team. No. When we started out with the original product development, we were actually the original team was only about six people. When we launched it back in July of 2025, we've grown the team, I think, I want to say about 14 or 15 people. We're not much bigger than that right now, so we're still able to fit in to a small room or a small bay in the office and work on the product together.