Kiro & Spec-Driven Development

Key concepts

1. 1
   Spec-driven workflow: Requirements → Design → Tasks → Code
2. 2
   Hooks: file-save and event-triggered automation
3. 3
   Steering files: persistent project conventions and context
4. 4
   Agentic file edits with diff preview and approval
5. 5
   Multi-step planning with self-correction

Key AWS services

• Kiro IDE
• Kiro CLI
• Amazon Q Developer

Learn more — curated resources

Hand-picked official docs, foundational papers, and the best community guides for going deeper on this topic.

• Kiro — official site
• Kiro documentation
• Kiro launch announcement
• Spec-driven development explained
• Amazon Q Developer

Sessions on this topic

17 sessions from the Summit covered this topic. Each is a self-contained mini-lesson.

1. DVT201Intermediate

   Building Software like never before with agentic AI

   Discover the future of software development as we explore the transformative power of agents with Kiros spec-driven development in modernizing your entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). Agentic AI is impacting software development by automating tasks, improving efficiency, and enabling more autonomous workflows throughout the development lifecycle. It allows teams to go beyond simple code generation to handle project planning, designing, testing, documentation, building agents into workflows, and retiring technical debt. Join us to explore how these powerful capabilities work together to help organizations accelerate from prototype to production ready applications.

2. PRT201-SIntermediate

   Postman and the Future of AI-Driven API Development in 2026

   Software development has fundamentally changed in 2026, driven by vibe coding, AI agents, and RAG/MCP. APIs are the interface layer for AI systems to perform meaningful work. For this to succeed, your APIs must be discoverable, consistent, and usable by both developers and agents. Postman is now central to designing, managing, and iterating on your APIs to be sustainable in this new era.

3. PRT216-SIntermediate

   Postman and the Future of AI-Driven API Development in 2026

   Postman and the Future of AI-Driven API Development in 2026 (sponsored by Postman, Inc)Software development has fundamentally changed in 2026, driven by vibe coding, AI agents, and RAG/MCP. APIs are the interface layer for AI systems to perform meaningful work. For this to succeed, your APIs must be discoverable, consistent, and usable by both developers and agents. Postman is now central to designing, managing, and iterating on your APIs to be sustainable in this new era.

4. DEV202Intermediate

   AI Native Development: Strategies and Impact across Amazon and AWS

   AI Native Development: Strategies and Impact across Amazon and AWSAmazon and AWS have evolved beyond AI-assisted development to embrace AI Native practices, integrating AI as a partner throughout the software development lifecycle. Learn how their teams leverage AWS foundational tools including Kiro, and Amazon Bedrock. Discover effective Prompt Driven Development methodologies and grassroots adoption strategies from early champions. See how Amazon enables teams to provide AI with right context through strategic use of MCP, RAG and custom models trained on Amazon technical knowledge. Understand the culture transformation required across multi-thousand person organizations, where every role must evolve. Gain actionable insights to accelerate your AI Native journey.

5. DEV314Advanced

   AI Native Development: Strategies and Impact across Amazon and AWS

   Amazon and AWS have evolved beyond AI-assisted development to embrace AI Native practices, integrating AI as a partner throughout the software development lifecycle. Learn how their teams leverage AWS foundational tools including Kiro, and Amazon Bedrock. Discover effective Prompt Driven Development methodologies and grassroots adoption strategies from early champions. See how Amazon enables teams to provide AI with right context through strategic use of MCP, RAG and custom models trained on Amazon technical knowledge. Understand the culture transformation required across multi-thousand person organizations, where every role must evolve. Gain actionable insights to accelerate your AI Native journey.

6. COP302Advanced

   Applying AI for FinOps and FinOps for AI

   Explore the intersection of AI and FinOps in this advanced session. First, discover how Kiro CLI can simplify AWS cost management by analyzing trends, explaining spend, and recommending optimizations like rightsizing and Savings Plans. Then, dive into FinOps for AI- learn how to track and control generative AI costs across Amazon EC2, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and more. We'll share architecture patterns, cost-saving strategies, and real-world examples to help you build scalable, production-ready AI solutions while staying on budget. Whether you're optimizing existing workloads or launching new AI initiatives, you'll leave with practical tools to maximize value.

7. DEV201Intermediate

   How Flybuys Built AI Governance to Accelerate Adoption at Scale

   Scaling AI successfully isnt just about moving fast — its about building the right foundations first. In this session, learn how Flybuys focused early on AI governance, steering documents, and engineering standards to enable smooth, secure AI adoption at scale. Well explore how upfront investment in guardrails, training, and approval processes allowed teams to deploy AI capabilities faster and with confidence. Youll hear how Flybuys is embedding governance and security expectations into engineering workflows using Kiro, including standardised steering patterns, approval pathways, and controlled rollout of AI capabilities such as Powers. Attendees will gain practical insights into how slowing down early can unlock faster, safer AI delivery across the organisation.

8. MAM305Advanced

   Legacy App modernization and reverse engineering using Kiro

   This session demonstrates how agentic AI systems revolutionize legacy application modernization through intelligent reverse engineering workflows. We showcase a multi-agent architecture that autonomously analyzes legacy codebases, generates comprehensive business specifications, and rebuilds cloud-native applications while preserving critical business logic. Our agentic framework orchestrates specialized AI agentsAnalyzer, Generator, Evaluator, and Refinerworking collaboratively to extract institutional knowledge from decades-old systems and validate modernized applications against original code. Drawing from real-world enterprise implementations including Commonwealth Bank of Australia's transformation, we present practical patterns for deploying autonomous AI agents that achieve 70% efficiency gains in modernization cycles.

9. IDE301Advanced

   Diversity In Tech - AI Literacy Skills - Rapid prototyping with Kiro

   In this workshop you will be shown how to build functional prototypes using our proven techniques. Learn how to leverage Kiro to go beyond "vibe-coding", and transform ideas into fully functional prototypes while validating technical approaches. Discover effective spec-driven development and prompt engineering techniques combining generative AI capabilities with AWS services for rapid iteration and refinement. If participants would like to follow along please bring your own laptop.

10. ISV201Intermediate

    MCP on EKS: Xero's AI-Driven Developer Experience

    AI coding agents are transforming how developers build and operate modern cloud-native applications. With tools such as Kiro CLI, Kiro IDE, or any MCP-compatible AI coding assistant, developers are embracing AI to move faster and scale smarter. This session explores how MCP servers help developers streamline code generation, deployment, and debugging by embedding infrastructure awareness directly into the AI assistant. Learn how Xero is leveraging MCP to speed up development, simplify operations, and deliver more reliable containerized apps at scale. Xero will also share their success story using Kiro CLI, Prometheus MCP, EKS MCP, and AWS Knowledge Base MCP to identify and resolve Prometheus cost spikesslashing costs by 40%.

11. TNC203Intermediate

    Structured Approach to AI coding with Spec-Driven Development on Kiro

    This session demonstrates how Kiro brings discipline and clarity to AI-assisted software development, ensuring generated code aligns with intended functionality and architecture. Explore Kiro's innovative spec-driven development approach for AI coding. Learn how to leverage structured specifications as a single source of truth, contrasting with unstructured 'vibe coding'. Discover how Kiro uses AI to generate detailed requirements, design, and task documents, guiding AI agents in code creation. Experience a workflow that enhances collaboration, maintainability, and documentation accuracy.

12. DEV306Advanced

    Taming Legacy Code: Multi-Agent AI in Brownfield Systems

    Real engineering happens in legacy codebases, not blank canvases. This session explores deploying multi-agent AI workflows using Kiro against brownfield production systems with tangled dependencies and accumulated technical debt. Learn how to orchestrate specialised agents for system mapping, dependency navigation, code generation, and validation within complex existing architectures. We'll examine practical strategies for providing sufficient context to agents, implementing guardrails to prevent regressions, and coordinating multiple agents toward shared goals. Walk away with actionable techniques for applying agentic AI to real-world codebases, understanding where automation delivers value and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.

13. SMB201Intermediate

    The AI-Driven Development Lifecycle: How Skyjed Shipped in 48 hours

    Traditional AI-assisted development treats AI as a tool. The AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) treats it as a central collaborator throughout the development process. In this session, join Skyjed CTO Stephen Brown, to share how his team applied AI-DLC to compress a 4-6 week implementation into 48 hours. Discover how AI-DLC's three phases — Inception, Construction, and Operations — reimagines the software lifecycle through AI-powered execution with human oversight and dynamic team collaboration. Drawing on Skyjed's firsthand experience on integrating AI-assisted development into their existing software development lifecycle, this talk explores how team collaboration, Kiro-powered workflows, and enterprise-grade code development practices were enhanced rather than replaced. You'll walk away with practical steps to achieve 1520x accelerationwithout sacrificing quality, governance, or control.

14. DEV206Intermediate

    AI Isnt Just for Developers: Using Kiro CLI & AWS MCP for Cloud Ops

    You cant turn your head sideways without seeing a slew of articles, blogs, or videos about AI, and most of them focus on developer tooling and writing code. But AI isnt just for developers. Its an incredibly powerful tool for operations folks, too.In this lightning talk, Ill share how I use Kiro CLI and the Kiro console with AWS Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations for day-to-day cloud operations. From information gathering and log analysis to reporting and IAM policy interpretation, these tools help reduce cognitive load and speed up your output when working with AWS environments.Ill also discuss how I used Kiros spec-driven development approach to build a Python-based reporting tool, despite not being a software developer.This session is designed to make AI tooling feel approachable and practical for anyone working in AWS — not just developers.

15. SMB205Intermediate

    How Blackmores accelerated SAP RISE connectivity with an EBA and Kiro

    Healthcare company, Blackmores, accelerated their SAP RISE program by utilising Experience Based Acceleration (EBA) to build a production-ready AWS Landing Zone with Terraform in two days using Kiro.

16. STP202Intermediate

    Stop Vibing, Start Shipping: How Startups Build with Kiro

    Prompt-and-pray development doesn't scale. Learn how startup engineering teams are adopting Kiro's spec-driven, agentic approach to go from requirements to working code on AWS with real adoption patterns, pitfalls, and measurable productivity impact.

17. FSI202Intermediate

    Accelerating Payment Innovation: Spec-Driven Development with AWS Kiro

    Australian Payments Plusoperator of Australia's critical payment infrastructure including eftpos, BPAY, and NPP, processing millions of daily transactionstransformed their development practices by adopting Spec-Driven Development using AWS Kiro. AP+ manages the payment rails connecting banks, merchants, and consumers throughout Australia. Through intensive Event-Driven Architecture bootcamps and hands-on training, engineering teams now independently run development workshops every two weeks, accelerating delivery of payment platform innovations while maintaining the highest security and compliance standards required for national financial infrastructure. Learn the practical framework for building development velocity in regulated environments.

One sharp, contrarian insight per session — the things teams don't think of unprompted.

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