Kiro Did It: Kiro Goes GA - And Replaces My Favorite CLI!

Kiro Goes GA - And It Just Replaced My Favorite CLI!

AWS announced the General Availability of Kiro on 11/17/25, and the update included several new features that immediately caught my attention. I have already appreciated Kiro for its vibe coding, specs-driven development approach, MCP integrations, and hooks. However, the most notable change for me was the introduction of the Kiro CLI and its seamless integration with the Kiro IDE.

I had originally planned to explore the Kiro CLI over the upcoming weekend… but little did I know my exploration would take a surprising turn.

Goodbye Q CLI, Hello Kiro CLI!

While checking the documentation, I discovered something unexpected:

Kiro CLI has officially replaced the Amazon Q Developer CLI

In other words :

one of my favorite dev tool CLIs got replaced by… another one of my favorite dev tool CLIs! 😄

Upgrading to Kiro CLI Took One Command

If you're already logged into the Q CLI, the upgrade path is literally a single command:

q update

Running this instantly upgraded my environment from Q CLI → Kiro CLI.

Here’s the message I received after the upgrade:

The transition was seamless, and all my existing workflows including MCP configurations immediately recognized the new CLI.

Quick Session With Kiro CLI

I couldn’t resist trying it out immediately.

To keep things simple, I asked Kiro CLI to do a quick cost projection for a hypothetical single-page website hosted on an EC2 instance, expecting around 10,000 hits per month.

What I Asked

Response I Received

Even for a lightweight scenario like this, the response Kiro generated was clean, structured, and extremely quick showcasing just how interactive and developer-friendly this CLI experience is.

Conclusion

It’s exciting to see how these GenAI-driven tools continue to evolve. With the launch of Kiro GA and the introduction of the Kiro CLI, AWS is clearly doubling down on making the entire development workflow conversational, intelligent, and frictionless.

Tools like Kiro aren’t just enhancing productivity, they’re transforming how we think about software development.

I can’t wait to see what additional surprises AWS brings to re:Invent 2025, especially in the Kiro ecosystem.

Stay tuned, I’ll be exploring more of the Kiro CLI capabilities in my upcoming articles!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this insightful.

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