With my experience with Amazon Q in the AWS console (100% useless, worse than a Google search), I can only assume that this Kiro product will suck and not be a market leader.
As a customer I have no incentive to try it.
I think that reputation is 100% Amazon’s fault. When all you do is ship half-baked rushed products your customers will assume your next big thing sucks because that’s the reputation you built for yourself.
AWS really shot themselves in the foot with naming everything “Amazon Q <insert suffix here>”. The Q that’s in the console is completely and entirely different from the “Q Developer” and other AI products that AWS is launching.
The Q Developer CLI, Q Developer IDE plugins, and now Kiro are pretty much just wrappers around Claude Sonnet 3.7/4, and work just as well as them.
Given the rapidly-changing state of AI, "half-baked" is a moving target. The Q console support was never great, but it's materially worse than it was a year ago, relative to what could be built today.
I would also like to add that forking VScode is not a value add. Just publish a VSCode extension.