Working on being a good person first and everything else second. Principal Engineer @awscloud Currently working on Kiro
Issaquah, WA
Joined March 2011
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I was on the Livestream Monday for the @kirodotdev GA announcement. Check it out!
youtube.com/live/V9wTN4oJWic…
Ricardo retweeted
I asked my 2 developers to speed up with Claude and Codex.
At first they were vibe coding:
😵 Features nobody asked for
🎲 Business rules guessed
🔁 Endless rework
So I showed them how serious teams use AI:
⚡ Bun ported ~500k lines of Zig to Rust with AI agents in 11 days
☁️ Amazon built Kiro: specs first, then code
🐙 GitHub open-sourced Spec Kit for spec-driven agents
The spec leads. The AI follows.
I built them a tutorial repo, now open source 👇
🚀 LearnHub: AI-driven Spec-Driven Development in Go
📝 Humans write specs
🤖 AI writes code
🔗 Every change maps to a requirement
🛡️ AGENTS.md keeps the AI in scope
🧪 Acceptance criteria define done
📈 Result: they now write their own specs to build, re-engineer, fix bugs and add features in any language.
Vibe coding is for prototypes. SDD is for products. 🧭
Now the mental picture of what you want to build should just be in the Creator or Developer's head but also in the mind of the AI.
TIPS for others: Read on Spec driven development + AI Agentic Engineering
github.com/otyang/learnhub-s…
#AI #SDD #ClaudeCode #SpecDrivenDevelopment
Ricardo retweeted
Kiro lives up to the hype.
I might replace @cursor_ai with @kirodotdev as my IDE if they can fix a few things.
✓ Specialized planning tools: plan, design, spec, todo.
✓ Really great at executing and overseeing tasks.
✓ Groks your codebase well & implements quickly!
🆇 Need to reign in the planning phase. It wants to be (overly) thorough.
🆇 Queued tasks always failed.
🆇 Separates diffs and code files / tends to feel more cluttered than cursor.
### Timestamps
00:00:00 - Introduction: First look at Kiro, an Amazon Cursor competitor.
00:00:24 - First Impressions: Exploring the Kiro UI (Specs, Agent, Hooks, Steering).
00:01:17 - First Prompt: Asking Kiro to analyze the project and suggest a feature.
00:02:34 - Kiro's Suggestion: AI-powered file analysis and processing.
00:03:31 - Narrowing Scope: Deciding to implement content extraction from images.
00:04:26 - Starting a Spec Session: Kiro initiates a dedicated planning and specification process.
00:05:06 - Generating Requirements: Kiro creates a requirements document with user stories.
00:06:44 - Design Phase: Moving from requirements to technical design.
00:07:17 - Generating a Design Doc: Kiro outlines the architecture, schema changes, and API operations.
00:08:04 - Wasp Background Jobs: Discussing how Kiro's plan might integrate with Wasp's job queue feature.
00:10:33 - Simplifying the Plan: Telling Kiro to create a simpler, iterative implementation plan.
00:12:50 - Implementation Phase: Kiro breaks the work down into a detailed task list.
00:14:53 - Task 1: Update Database Schema: Kiro modifies `schema.prisma` and prepares for migration.
00:15:33 - Running CLI Commands: Manually running the database migration command.
00:18:03 - Task 2: Create Content Extraction Utility: Kiro starts creating the utility function to call the OpenAI Vision API.
00:18:19 - Kiro vs. Cursor: Initial thoughts on how Kiro's workflow compares to Cursor.
00:19:59 - Handling Errors: Kiro runs into compilation errors and attempts to fix them.
00:22:36 - Task 3: Create Server Operation: Kiro works on the backend operation for content extraction.
00:26:05 - AWS Issues: Skipping ahead after resolving AWS permissions issues manually.
00:26:27 - Live Demo: Demonstrating the completed feature by uploading an image and extracting text.
00:27:41 - Final Review: Overall impressions of Kiro, its strengths (spec/planning), weaknesses (bugs), and potential.
Ricardo retweeted
En mi empresa los nuevos proyectos se están haciendo con spec-driven development usando herramientas como Kiro.
Donde antes te hacían falta 5 juniors ahora con un senior y la IA vas sobrado.
Hoy más que nunca es obligatorio invertir.
No quieras depender de un salario.
Ricardo retweeted
OPINION: I’m voting yes on I-645 to repeal Washington’s so-called millionaires’ tax, and I hope you will too. I have plenty of reasons, but one line in the law deserves a closer look: it caps charitable deductions at $100,000.
mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion…
Ricardo retweeted
Washington, I know this ballot is confusing as hell. And that is on purpose. Politicians in our state are trying to confuse you becuase they don't believe in democracy.
The only reason we get to vote on this is that enough brave people stood up and demanded it. Otherwise, the governor would have signed this into law like the King of England, treating us like serfs with no rights and no power.
Well, I won't stand for being tricked, lied to, and treated like a child.
Just to be crystal clear, if you vote "Yes," it will repeal the illegal income tax.
It will not reduce funding to schools or human services because the tax doesn't go into effect until 2029. So we aren't taking anything away.
Starbucks left because of this. Microsoft has threatened to move jobs out of state. Amazon now employs nearly 15,000 fewer people in Seattle than at its peak. Seattle is second to last in the number of VC deals that closed in Q3.
Holding a small number of companies and rich people hostage, when they have options, is a foolish strategy that is already backfiring spectacularly.
The solution?
Reduce taxes on businesses and income. Why even tax people under 25 at all? Give families with children a HUGE tax credit. Make this state an incredible place to do business and have a family. Encourage entrepreneurs to come here. Get startups, agencies, and smart, motivated people to build here.
We can increase overall state revenue if more people make stuff, employ people, and create more value for everyone here. Not by chasing them out of the state and creating a hostile environment for business.
Remember this: governments and taxes don't make jobs. Entrepreneurs do.
Ricardo retweeted
“When opponents put an initiative on the November ballot to repeal the tax and prevent lawmakers from passing similar income taxes in the future, the Democratic state Attorney General added an ominous description to discourage voters from supporting it.”
wsj.com/opinion/washington-m…
Ricardo retweeted
Democratic state Senate candidates in Washington drop the pretense that the millionaire tax will apply only to the wealthy.
on.wsj.com/3Wefoyu
Ricardo retweeted
Many developers run @kirodotdev's agent directly on their local machine so it can see the same filesystem, toolchain, and localhost services they do. That's what makes it effective for building and testing real projects. Today, developers manage that risk by reviewing every command before approving it. As agents take on longer tasks and developers run more sessions in parallel, that attention becomes the bottleneck.
Local sandboxing changes the trust model: even after a command is approved, the operating system still limits what it can read and write on your machine, and which network destinations it can reach. The agent still runs natively on your machine, but the commands it executes are restricted by the kernel. You can turn sandboxing on or off mid-session without restarting.
Available now on macOS, Linux, and Windows: kiro.dev/blog/local-sandboxi…
Ricardo retweeted
"If God had wanted man to play soccer, He wouldn't have given us arms."
- Mike Ditka
RIP to a legend
Ricardo retweeted
Unfortunately a lot of people are not very good at clearly describing:
1. What they want.
2. How to verify that it is right.
Or as it used to be called: requirements.
I am surprised that people are surprised this is how I prompt Claude.
Talk to Claude the way you would a coworker. There's no secret to prompting. There's no need to be overly scaffolded or prescriptive for most tasks -- give Claude a goal, and it will figure it out.
Back in the Sonnet 3.5 days, your prompt mattered a lot. Nowadays, it's much more important to communicate to the model:
1. What you want it to do
2. How much effort you want it to spend
3. How it should verify that it did the right thing
Ricardo retweeted
Kiro 💜 Manufacturing
A 113-year-old, third-generation family-owned manufacturer with 35 developers compressed years of planned software development into weeks, rewriting what a small engineering team can build. 8 production-ready outcomes were delivered in 2 days.
Read the full story: spr.ly/6015BG221J
Ricardo retweeted
I’ve been using Kiro to build an apps, and two of them have already made it to production.
Everyone is talking about Codex and Claude Code.
But I think Kiro deserves a seat at the table.
I wrote about why 👇
Ricardo retweeted
deleting the product
it's funny how you can sometimes tell if a team culture is dysfunctional just by looking at how their app is laid out. behind every feature, or tab in a sidebar likely lies a PM or someone responsible for an OKR.
the problem is when individual performance is measured by these metrics. it becomes the singular focus of the responsible person to make those numbers look good, since it determines whether they get rewarded or axed, even if it comes at the detriment of the overall quality of the product. this is why you mostly see features get added, but rarely removed. if you own a feature, then it being removed feels like an aura loss.
this is even worse in the agentic era when the cost to add features has become so low. you can simply will a new feature into existence overnight and add another tab. but users will notice that you ship your org chart.
teams that make people play silly games under the guise of performance management rarely build great products.
to build a great product you need to first fix your culture
Ricardo retweeted
Strands Decider 2B, a small, open-source decision model, perfect for experimentation but capable enough for real work: strandsagents.com/blog/intro…
We've open sourced the whole recipe, with all the training data, code, and log of what we learned along the way: github.com/strands-labs/stra…
It's great to see formal verification highlighted in the AI discourse. Hardest part of this is defining your program behavior. Here's some examples of cutting edge work Amazon is doing in this space as part of Neurosymbolic AI
arxiv.org/abs/2511.09008
kiro.dev/blog/deep-spec-anal…
Ricardo retweeted
The most important skills for using AI coding agents effectively. Presenting the AI Engineering Skills Map for using coding agents.
Ricardo retweeted
Kiro Web が正式提供になったよ👻
ブラウザーから開発作業を作り、任せ、進み具合を調整できる Kiro Web の一般提供が始まったよ。
・アイデアを一緒に整理
Kiro Web では、アイデアを探りながら開発の方向性を整理できるよ。
考えを対話でまとめたいときに、最初の一歩を軽くしてくれるね。
・Specs で開発を形にする
Specs を使って、作りたいものを具体化しながら開発を進められるよ。
要件や方針を先に整理してから実装へ進めたいときに役立つね。
・タスクを最後まで任せる
Kiro Web にタスクを渡して、開発作業を端から端まで任せられるよ。
アイデアの検討から実装までを一つの流れで進めたいときに便利そうだね。
・ブラウザーからアイデア出し、仕様整理、実装までをつなげられるので、開発の進め方に新しい選択肢が増えたね。
Kiro Web Is Now Generally Available
kiro.dev/changelog/web/kiro-…
