Kiro Release Notes

This release gives you finer control over how conversations flow and how the model thinks. Rewind to any earlier prompt to explore a different path, set reasoning effort per model, and manage all your preferences from one unified settings menu. Workspace initialization is also 88% faster.

Rewind conversations

Jump back to any earlier prompt in a conversation and continue from that point in a new session. Use /rewind to pick a turn, then branch off without losing your original thread. This is useful when you want to explore an alternative approach or undo a direction the agent took without starting over from scratch. Learn more ->

Model Reasoning Effort

Control how much thinking the model does with /effort. Choose from five levels: low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. Lower effort means faster, cheaper responses for straightforward tasks; higher effort gives the model more room to reason through complex problems. Learn more ->

Unified Settings Menu

Access theme customization, keyboard shortcuts, and terminal configuration from a single /settings command. Run /settings theme to change colors, /settings keybindings to view shortcuts, or /settings terminal to enable Shift+Enter/Option+Enter for multi-line input. The existing /theme command still works as a shortcut. Learn more ->

This release gives you more control over which MCP servers you can connect to, where Kiro lives, and how the TUI responds to your keystrokes.

OAuth Client ID for MCP Servers

Connect to HTTP-based MCP servers that don't support Dynamic Client Registration by setting a pre-registered oauth.clientId in your MCP config. This unlocks services like Slack, GitHub, and Figma that require manual app registration for OAuth, so you can use their MCP servers without running your own proxy. Learn more ->

KIRO_HOME Environment Variable

Point Kiro at a different directory for global agents, prompts, skills, steering, settings, and sessions by setting KIRO_HOME before launching. This is handy when you manage dotfiles across machines, keep work and personal profiles separate, or need to isolate Kiro's state for containerized environments. Learn more ->

Configurable V2 TUI Keybindings

Remap the cancel, close-menu, and quit actions in the V2 TUI to keys that fit your muscle memory. If Ctrl+C and Esc conflict with your tmux prefix or terminal bindings, you can now pick different keys instead of working around the defaults. Learn more ->

Agent Output Side Channels

Shell commands the agent runs can now stream output through two additional channels. Write to $AGENT_DISPLAY_OUT to show rich progress in the TUI without bloating the agent's context, and write to $AGENT_CONTEXT_OUT to surface lines in the tool result's agent_notes field. Stdout keeps working as before. Learn more ->

Kiro Web (Preview)

Kiro Web (Preview) is now available at app.kiro.dev for Kiro Pro, Pro+, and Power users. Chat with the agent to explore ideas, fix bugs, and shape changes, or hand off end-to-end tasks that finish as pull requests. Coordinate one change across multiple repos in a single session.

Collaborative and autonomous modes

Work with the agent two ways. In the default collaborative mode, you drive the conversation: discuss approaches, write code together, and ask the agent to open a PR when you're ready. Toggle on Autonomous mode when you want the agent to own the outcome. It asks clarifying questions upfront, builds a plan, delegates to specialized sub-agents, and opens a PR automatically.

GitHub-native workflow

Select the repos you want to work with at the start of a session. The agent clones them into an isolated sandbox and coordinates edits and pull requests across all of them in a single run, from shared libraries to dependent services and clients. Assign work from GitHub issues with the kiro label or a /kiro comment. The agent creates feature branches, commits on your behalf, and opens pull requests with detailed descriptions. Review PRs with comments and the agent picks them up and pushes updates. Use /kiro all to address every reviewer's feedback at once, or /kiro fix to tackle one conversation thread at a time.

Steering that carries forward

Guide the agent with your team's standards and conventions. Steering files in .kiro/steering/ load your patterns at the start of every session, using the same format that works in Kiro IDE and Kiro CLI. You can also teach the agent through PR comments, and your feedback carries forward to future work across all your repositories.

Isolated sandbox by default

Every task runs in its own isolated sandbox. The agent clones your repos, configures the environment from detected project settings, and tears everything down when the task completes. You control network access, environment variables, secrets, and MCP servers from the agent settings page.

This release makes Kiro Specs faster to start, faster to finish, and harder to get wrong. Run independent tasks concurrently for faster execution, skip approval gates with Quick Plan when you already know the scope, and catch logical inconsistencies in your requirements before they become implementation problems.

Parallel Task Execution

Run all Tasks now runs independent tasks concurrently instead of one at a time. No configuration needed - click Run all Tasks and Kiro handles the rest. It analyzes your task list for dependencies and groups independent tasks into parallel waves, each running in its own isolated context. For specs with 4+ independent tasks, this can cut execution time by up to 4x.

Quick Plan

A new Spec session mode for when you already know what you want to build. Kiro generates requirements, design, and tasks in a single pass without approval gates between phases. It asks clarifying questions up front (scope, constraints, edge cases) then produces all three artifacts. You land directly on the task list, ready to build. Same traceability and correctness that Specs provide, with a tighter feedback loop.

Analyze Requirements

A deep analysis pass that catches logical inconsistencies, ambiguities, conflicting constraints, and gaps in your requirements before you move to design. Kiro uses automated reasoning to find issues that are hard to catch in a read-through - ambiguous language, conflicting constraints, and logical gaps. Results appear in chat as clarifying questions you can resolve in seconds.

This release adds adaptive thinking support so model reasoning carries across turns in a conversation, giving you more coherent answers as context builds. It also fixes a silent failure in subagent tool dispatch when MCP servers update their tool specs mid-execution.

Adaptive Thinking

Kiro CLI now preserves model reasoning across multi-turn conversations. Thought content from earlier turns stays available to the model on subsequent turns, so follow-up answers stay aligned with the reasoning that produced previous responses. You get more coherent multi-step workflows without re-explaining context.

This release focuses on keeping you in flow: shell output streams as it happens, Tool Search loads MCP tools on demand so your context window stays clear, and skills are now invokable as slash commands. This release also adds device flow authentication for remote environments, RHEL support, and several rendering and stability fixes.

Real-Time Shell Output Streaming

Shell command output now streams to the terminal line by line as it runs, instead of buffering until the process completes. Long-running commands like builds, test suites, and deployments show progress immediately, so you can follow along and catch issues early.

Tool Search

Tool Search loads MCP tools on demand instead of sending every definition with each request, keeping your context window clear when you have many MCP servers configured. Enable it with
kiro-cli settings toolSearch.enabled true.

Skills as Slash Commands

Skills defined in .kiro/skills/ are now available as /skill-name slash commands. Type / and the skill name to invoke it directly, giving you quick access to reusable agent instructions without switching agents or copying instructions into your prompt.

Device Flow for Remote Environments

Sign in with Google or GitHub from SSH sessions, containers, and cloud workspaces without port forwarding. The CLI displays a URL and one-time code you enter in any browser — same flow as Builder ID and IAM Identity Center.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Support

Kiro CLI's terminal UI now runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you're working in enterprise Linux environments, you get the same full-featured terminal UI experience available on other Linux distributions, macOS, and Windows.

Added support for Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic's latest Opus model with stronger agentic coding performance, more precise instruction following, and 3x higher resolution vision. Rolling out with experimental support to a subset of Pro, Pro+, and Power tier subscribers signing in with AWS IAM Identity Center, with broader availability to follow. Support for Google, GitHub, and AWS Builder ID sign-in is coming soon. 1M token context window with a 2.2x credit multiplier. Inference runs in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) and eu-central-1 (Frankfurt). Restart your IDE or CLI to access it from the model selector.

Kiro CLI 2.0 expands platform support to Windows, introduces headless mode for CI/CD automation, graduates the terminal UI from experimental to the default experience, and adds new capabilities across subagents, hooks, and MCP configuration.

Windows Support

Kiro CLI now runs natively on Windows 11. Windows users can now build using the same agentic coding experience available on macOS and Linux — terminal UI, headless mode, custom agents, and MCP servers all included. Install from PowerShell and background auto-updates keep you current.

Learn more ->

Headless Mode

Run Kiro CLI non-interactively in CI/CD pipelines, automation scripts, and environments without a browser. Authenticate with an API key via the KIRO_API_KEY environment variable, pass a prompt with --no-interactive, and Kiro executes it end-to-end. Use --trust-all-tools or --trust-tools to grant tool permissions upfront. API key authentication is available for Pro, Pro+, and Power subscribers, and enterprise admins can control API key generation through governance settings.

Learn more ->

Terminal UI as Default

The terminal UI is now the default chat interface. It gives you syntax-highlighted markdown, interactive overlay panels, visual tool progress, and a full set of keyboard shortcuts. Use the crew monitor (Ctrl+G) to track subagent activity in real time, /theme to customize colors, /copy for clipboard access over SSH, /transcript to review conversation history in your pager, /guide to switch to the onboarding agent, and /spawn to run parallel agent sessions. Subagents now support task dependencies — for example, analyze a codebase first, then refactor modules, then run tests, with each step waiting for the previous one to finish while independent steps run in parallel. Switch back to the classic interface anytime with --classic or kiro-cli settings chat.ui "classic".

Learn more ->

Added support for GLM-5, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with a 200K context window designed for complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks. GLM-5 excels at processing repository-scale context and maintaining coherence during multi-step tool use across large codebases, making it a strong choice for cross-file migrations, full-stack feature development, and legacy refactoring where the model needs to hold the full picture. Available with experimental support in both the Kiro IDE and Kiro CLI. Inference runs in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) with a 0.5x credit multiplier. Restart your IDE or CLI to access it from the model selector.