I Got Access to Kiro Preview. Amazon Cannot Compete with Claude-Code

Over the weekend I got access to Kiro (Amazon's AI IDE answer to anthropic) and I was pretty excited. One of the biggest leverage points I learned when developing with claude-code was that good requirements gathering and task generation was the key to prevent the slop.

So when I got access to Kiro, which was centered around this very problem, I expected it to go way beyond what claude-code's vanilla quality output was. But.. I was pretty disappointed.

It failed my expectations for a few reasons:

Rigid documentation structure (the steering docs) that requires significant context management with the dynamic path matching configuration.

The way it runs into phases based on a single "vibe" prompt without good back-and-forth feedback made me feel like it was just hallucinating a bunch of random stuff. Didn't really see how this was improving over CC.

No support for persona-based subagents that can operate in independent contexts.

Only supports Claude 3.7/4 with no support for frontier models like Opus or GPT5. I mean what even is the point if you don't have access to the latest and greatest?

Bizarre pricing with “spec” and “vibe” requests. Somehow they’re repeating all the mistakes cursor made instead of leaning into the "cool-down" pricing that anthropic has done (which I personally like).

Wondering if you guys feel the same way? What exactly is the point of Amazon trying to compete with Anthropic or OpenAI if they don't own or cannot vend the frontier models? This alone is enough of a reason not to switch to a AI DevX experience they're vending.