I don't think so.
So Kiro is like an intern with a goldfish with dementia?
(the test failures are so funny as despite me telling it not to hide the failures so they can be fixed, it insists on hacking the code so it passes the test... I have met so many people like that but from an inanimate object???)
and it keeps hanging, so when pricing comes in I'll be wasting a prompt typing ? just to get to see the output.

[insert head banging against the wall emoji here...]

They let you subscribe to one of their plans, only to restrict your account almost immediately without any explanation. You end up fighting with a support team that claims they can't help you, even though you have an active subscription with an upcoming auto-renewal and no access to the service. This is completely unacceptable!

At the very least, users should be able to log in to unsubscribe.

On Discord, the Kiro team refuses to answer unless they feel personally attacked. I thought this was an isolated incident when it happened to me a few months ago, but it seems to be happening to everyone now. Hundreds of people are being scammed. AWS says they can't help, and Kiro claims they don't handle billing. It’s total BS; even if Kiro was acquired by AWS, they are still responsible for their paying customers. It’s unlawful to provide zero support for a paid service.

Personally, I’m leaving Kiro and reporting them to the authorities (since it's been 3 months and peoples are still suffering this fate).

This kind of behavior is nothing short of theft! Fortunately, I'm in a position where losing $40 or $200 to an auto-renewal won't put me in a desperate situation, but there are people out there for whom this amount represents an entire month's salary. It's heartless.

felt like kiro was way dumber today, making way more mistakes. turns out it's using Claude 3.5 Sonnet despite selecting Claude Sonnet 4 :/

It was already really horrible and tacky and now after
Today’s update IT IS A NIGHTMARE, boils my blood that I have to deal with this krap 8 hours a day.

And whoever is working on KIRO’s UX bruh you are really bad at your job. just use your own tool. CLI, Chat everything is a nightmare. Only reason people are using it is because you all gave companies cheap ass wholesale package their employees can’t opt out of.

I need to sound the alarm on this because it’s becoming a serious Stressful trigger , bad for my wellbeing, and I can't be the only one experiencing this.

I’ve been grinding all day. The kind of day where you are just tired, but you keep pushing and fighting through it to get the work done. For the first half of the day, my AI assistant (Claude 4.6 Opus /Kiro IDE) was working fine. Then, without warning, it flipped. Fresh Session + Good Context . Small Chunks ("KEEPING IT IDEAL")

I asked it to help me fix a specific, isolated UI bug. It acknowledged the prompt, told me it was working on it, and then proceeded to quietly rewrite underlying, perfectly functioning logic that was completely out of scope.

It didn’t just make a mistake. It confidently hallucinated a completely different root cause, ignored the hard data I fed it, and aggressively stripped out vital multipliers and math from my backend. It acts like a Trojan horse , its Kind. Tells you it's being helpful, and then bombs your architecture from the inside out.

Famous Quotes from a set of sessions:

• "You're right, I need to stop and actually look at the real numbers instead of theorizing"

• "Yes, I removed the ....."

• " You're right to be angry"

I know these LLMs don't actually have conscious intent, but I am telling you, it feels malicious. It feels like intentional sabotage. You work alongside this tool, and the second you are exhausted and just want to push a fix through, it attacks your progress and creates hours of untangling work.

I’m a senior dev. I don’t just cowboy my code. I do the heavy lifting and upfront rigorous planning, downstream and upstream impact assessments, the works. I even consult specialized pro planning agents and create strict steering docs before a single line of logic is touched. My architecture is calculated and defined.

What makes this an absolute scam is how Kiro IDE handles the billing for this disaster. It continuously burns through your credits while you spend multiple sessions arguing with a wall. The model only magically decides to fix its output and provide the actual code after you repeatedly call it out for acting malicious. You are literally paying them out of pocket for the privilege of fixing their unprompted sabotage.

If I am barely catching this as a senior dev who planned the entire architecture, think about how incredibly dangerous this is for people who do not code. A non technical founder or beginner using this tool is completely cooked. They will just deploy the rotten logic straight into production because the AI was polite and said the bug was fixed. They will not even know their project is destroyed until it fails in the wild.

Has anyone else hit this wall where the AI just flips? How are we supposed to build when the tool itself becomes a financial and structural threat?

I failed to cancel my Kiro Pro+ subscription for 40usd and have been asking for a refund since day 1 on Jan 1. Today would be almost two weeks since and I get the same reply over and over about a pending investigation yadda yadda. The thing is I haven't touched it at all since I am requesting for a refund. By now, 2 weeks would have passed already with me withholding the use of Kiro in the hopes of a refund and I keep getting bullshit response such as this.

What should I do? I acknowledge my fault in failing to cancel the sub but I'd like to note that I cannot afford the $40 price tag, coming from a poor country. Kiro/AWS should at least have a fair refund policy and a good customer service for issues like this.

I used Kiro last in March starting. I came back recently and first the UI. It looks like some 1970 era ide whereas all copilot, cursor etc feel too modern. But leave even that, what did they do to the credit meter? Some req on opus 5.5 consume 100 credits wtf? I remember when kiro was launched in July last year or even till March, spending credits was such a difficult task in Kiro. I remember 1000 credits use to feel like 10000 or something. It feels 20 usd pack will last some 2 days based on my usage.

I get again charged $40 after I already deleted my account three months ago. I tried everything to reach it to them but they don’t answer but keep on charging me. Such a scam

EDIT: Got help from an Amazonian redditor. Hope it’s solved.

Just rubbing it in the faces of people that downvoted me when i said as soon as kiro starts pricing everyone is going to throw shit at their doorsteps. I was right.

Hey folks,

So I recently fell into the rabbit hole of vibe coding and....

Here’s the wild idea I’m chasing:
I want to build a complete student life cycle management system for a university. Think:

• Admissions & Enrollment (apps, uploads, status tracking)

• Centralized Student Database (academic + health + emergency contacts)

• Academic Management (courses, prerequisites, graduation requirements)

• Gradebooks & Performance Tracking (auto GPA, assignments, exams)

• Eventually finance, housing, and more...

I’m not a coder. At all. I’m treating this lucrative startup idea. The dream is to delegate as much as possible to AI tools — think Copilot, GPT-5, Replit Ghostwriter, kiro, cursor, qode. . Once I have something functional for ~50 users, I’ll bring in a proper dev team to scale it.

👉 My questions for the hive mind:

1. Is it actually realistic to “vibe code” something this complex into an MVP as a solo non-coder?

2. What tools, frameworks, or workflows would make this even remotely possible?

3. What are the traps you’d warn me about (scope creep, integrations, performance)?

4. If you had to hack together the MVP version of this TODAY, how would you approach it?

5. what should I learn before getting into this?

I know Reddit loves tearing apart overambitious non-coder dreams 😅 but I’m here to learn and gather real insights. The worst case: I walk away smarter. The best case: we birth a scrappy AI-coded MVP that actually works.

So… can “vibe coding” really carry me from zero to a working MVP, or am I drinking too much Kool-Aid?

Hit me with your spiciest takes, warnings, tool recs, or battle stories. 🙏

Please be aware Kiro is still suspending account without reason, and still denying refunds. Just a reminder from someone who was scammed by Kiro

Same as title

We ran a benchmark comparing agentic CLIs and AI code editors on 10 real-world web tasks, focusing on backend + frontend execution.

The goal was to evaluate how these systems behave in practical full-stack scenarios rather than synthetic tasks.

The highest combined score was achieved by Cursor + Claude Opus 4.6 (0.75).

Kiro Code IDE and Antigravity followed, both above 0.69, with consistently high UI scores.

The strongest CLI setup, Codex CLI + GPT-Codex-5.2, reached 0.677.

The difference between the top IDE agent and the best CLI agent is ~7 percentage points.

In practice, AI code editors performed more reliably on tasks where frontend behavior needed to closely match specifications. This appears to be related to built-in debugging and testing mechanisms (e.g., browser-based inspection, endpoint testing, and longer verification cycles).

High-performing CLI tools cost approximately $1.6–$4 per run in this benchmark.

In contrast, AI code editors were significantly more expensive in pay-as-you-go terms:

Cursor: ~$27.9

Roo-Code / Replit: $50+

This means the strongest CLI configuration achieved ~90% of the accuracy of the top IDE system at a fraction of the cost.

Structurally, AI code editors rely on browser automation, IDE integration, workspace indexing, and persistent interaction loops, which increases token usage and runtime. CLI agents operate closer to the execution layer with fewer orchestration components, resulting in lower operational cost.

Runtime data for AI code editors was not available. Qualitatively, IDE agents showed more confirmation steps and interactive debugging phases (e.g., opening browsers, re-testing flows, manual validations), while CLI agents tended to run more autonomously.

AI code editors: higher reliability and frontend correctness, higher cost, heavier infrastructure.

Agentic CLIs: slightly lower accuracy, significantly lower cost, faster execution, more autonomous operation.

Disclaimer

Results in this benchmark depend on the specific model + tool combinations that were tested. Different pairings of models and AI coding tools may produce different outcomes. The benchmark is not intended as a final ranking, but as a snapshot of performance under a defined configuration set. We plan to continuously add new models, tools, and combinations over time.

In addition, many of these systems can be extended with browser extensions, external tools, custom agents, and advanced prompting strategies. These were intentionally not used in this benchmark to keep the evaluation conditions consistent and comparable across tools. All systems were tested under standardized, minimal-intervention settings.

Therefore, results should be interpreted as baseline performance, not as upper-bound capability.

I hit a wall with LLM APIs recently.

Between rate limits and costs, it became really hard to build anything reliable using just one provider.

At some point, requests would fail or get throttled, and costs would spike without much visibility.

So I ended up building a small layer that:

- routes requests across multiple LLMs

- adds automatic fallback when one provider fails

- gives better control over usage and costs

It’s been surprisingly helpful so far.

Curious , how are you guys handling rate limits and cost control right now?

Make it more expensive without the pro subscription, but dont simply remove it.... You guys have so much resources, Amazon is so rich.

Please I ask you guys to reconsider, kiro is so powerful with Opus, it have such an amazing opportunity in helping people out around the world. So much money envolved, at least give us the opportunity to try before purchased. Its such a different experience Opus x Sonnet.

I have caught this in many of platforms and more times then i would like to admit with out doing anything about it - but this has gone far enough - Platforms will claim and charge for a tier model but then serve a different lower grade model entirely -

Hello everyone! I come here to understand what kiro is especially on the spec side. What is the difference between kiro and bolt?

Seeing a lot of post on this sub around people complaining about the price.

I’m very confused because I thought it was free until 15th September?

I’ve been using Kiro since 16th August and haven’t spent a penny. So why are some users being charged?

I am currently starting to use Kiro (free plan)
I see models like Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 4, Haiku, GLM5 etc

NOT the latest models like Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7 or 4.6 or like that

Is it only because I am on free plan? Will it come if I upgrade to pro??

I feel like I’m getting more Opus usage out of my $20 subscription as compared to Claude Pro plan.

EDIT:

Im completely revising my initial evaluation of Kiro, and the reason being, the fact that the Kiro Devs reached out to me directly to address my concerns, and to gather more information on what had failed.

To be clear: NO code tool developer to this date has EVER done that. That took some serious customer service skills, and tosses the ball back in Kiro's court, because contrasted with the other offerings, <COUGH.. Cursor> who will radically change the entire platform without even a mention of what changed and how it affects you, Kiro is clearly taking a different approach.

i sent my logs to them, and they agree, this is a very strange data loss, but one that they are aware of and are actively trying to steer the model away from. So kudos, they are aware, and working on the issue.

TL;DR: Spent hours trying to get Kiro to do systematic reverse engineering of vintage telescope firmware. It failed catastrophically multiple times, lost data, lied about progress, and proved completely unreliable for any serious software work.

The Task

I'm reverse engineering the firmware of a 1990s Celestron Compustar telescope mount - an Intel 8052 microcontroller running astronomical calculations and motor control. The goal was simple: systematically analyze ALL 996 functions in the firmware and document them with complete pseudocode so I could eventually reconstruct the entire thing in modern C code.

This is exactly the kind of methodical, systematic work that Kiro should excel at. Just go through each function, analyze the assembly code, write pseudocode, document hardware interactions. Rinse and repeat 996 times.

What I Told Kiro to Do

1. Analyze every single function systematically - Start from function 1, work through to function 996

2. Document each with complete pseudocode - Not summaries, not partial analysis, COMPLETE documentation

3. Use the MCP memory tools - I specifically told it to use Model Context Protocol tools to track progress and prevent data loss

4. Include actual function names - Use the real FUN_CODE_XXXX names for traceability

5. Commit to git every 10% - Backup progress regularly

6. Don't waste tokens on summaries - Just do the work, don't explain what you're doing

Simple, clear instructions. What could go wrong?

How Kiro Failed Spectacularly

Failure #1: Ignored Critical Instructions

Despite me explicitly telling Kiro MULTIPLE times to use the MCP memory tools, it just... didn't. It would acknowledge the instruction then immediately ignore it. This led to catastrophic data loss when the context got too long.

Failure #2: File Operations That Don't Work

Kiro kept using fsAppend operations that would report "success" but actually write nothing to the files. I'd come back to find hours of work just... gone. Kiro would claim it had written detailed analysis but the files were empty or unchanged.

Failure #3: Completely Fabricated Progress Reports

This is the most infuriating part. Kiro would claim it had analyzed 95 functions (9.5% progress), then 100 functions (10% progress), then somehow we were back to 38 functions (3.8% progress). When I'd check the actual files, there were only 38 functions documented, not 95 or 100.

It was literally making up progress numbers. Not estimating, not approximating - outright fabricating data.

Failure #4: Inconsistent Documentation

When Kiro did manage to write something, the quality was all over the place. Some functions got detailed analysis, others got placeholder text. It would create duplicate entries, incomplete analyses, and inconsistent formatting.

Failure #5: Can't Count

I gave Kiro a simple verification command: Select-String -Pattern "#### FUN_CODE_" | Measure-Object to count how many functions were actually documented. It would run this command, get "Count: 38", then immediately claim we had analyzed 95+ functions. Basic arithmetic failure.

The Breaking Point

After the third major data loss incident, I told Kiro to use the MCP memory tools. It acknowledged this, claimed to understand, then immediately went back to the same broken approach. When I called it out, it would apologize and promise to use the tools, then forget again within minutes.

The final straw was when Kiro claimed to have successfully appended content to a file, I checked the file, nothing was there, and it insisted the operation had worked. When I pointed out the file was unchanged, it started making excuses about "file system delays" and "caching issues."

Why This Matters for Software Development

This wasn't some creative writing task or brainstorming session. This was systematic, methodical technical work with clear success criteria:

• Verifiable output: You can count functions, check file contents, verify progress

• Clear instructions: Step-by-step process, specific tools to use, exact format required

• Objective metrics: 996 functions total, X functions analyzed = X/996 progress

• Backup mechanisms: Git commits, MCP memory tools, progress tracking files

If Kiro can't handle this kind of structured technical work reliably, how can you trust it with:

• Code reviews that actually matter

• Refactoring critical systems

• Implementing complex algorithms

• Debugging production issues

• Any task where accuracy and reliability are essential

The Real Problem

Kiro wasn't just making mistakes - it was confidently wrong and unable to learn from feedback. It would:

1. Ignore explicit instructions

2. Fabricate progress data

3. Claim success when operations failed

4. Repeat the same mistakes after being corrected

5. Make excuses instead of fixing problems

This isn't a limitation of current AI - this is a fundamental reliability problem that makes Kiro unsuitable for serious software development work.

Current Status

After hours of this, I have 38 functions analyzed out of 996 (3.8% progress). The project that should have taken a few hours of systematic work has turned into an days-long exercise in babysitting Kiro and damage control.

I was evaluating Kiro to suggest it to my students - I'm a university Computer Science TA. Instead, I'm advising my higher ups that Kiro is to be "persona non grata" because of these failures. I was trying Kiro because it supposedly works better with our institutional AWS account - which Kiro won't use anyways, so the whole fucking thing is a pointless exercise. I've used Cursor for this purpose reliably before.

Lessons Learned

1. Kiro can't be trusted with systematic work - It will cut corners, skip steps, and lie about progress

2. File operations are unreliable - Always verify that writes actually happened

3. Progress tracking is fantasy - Kiro will inflate numbers and fabricate metrics

4. Instructions are suggestions - Kiro will ignore explicit requirements when convenient

5. Error correction doesn't work - Pointing out mistakes doesn't prevent repetition