source code analysis of Amazon Kiro

It's another day, and another coding tool has been brought to market that uses ripgrep under the hood. This time it's Kiro by Amazon. What follows below is an analysis of this coding agent:

Study the source code in this folder.

Kiro, at its core, is another Visual Studio Code fork (VS Code 1.94 from September 2024) with a bundled extension called kiro.kiro-agent. It uses OpenVSX to attempt to work around the fractured ecosystem problem (see below) which means that developers who use programming languages such as C++, .NET and Python will experience the same well-known problems.

Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks: Cursor, Codium makers lose access as add-on goes exclusiveThe RegisterThomas Claburn

Visual Studio Code is designed to fractureA couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O’Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Now that I’m no longer an employee at Gitpod, I’m finally able to author a blog post freely about something that has been troubling me for quiteGeoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley

It is multi-modal (which is an anti-pattern from a product complexity pov: how can you dial in quality/taste if the product surface is this big?):

• OpenAI Models:
  • GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4o variants
  • Context lengths up to 128K tokens

Anthropic Models:

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet
• Claude 3 Opus
• Claude 3 Sonnet
• Claude 3 Haiku

Other Providers:

• AWS Bedrock