I don't know if this is feedback for Kiro per se or more feedback for this category of applications as a whole, but I've personally noticed that the biggest barrier holding me back from giving an earnest look at new coding agents are the custom rules I've set up w/ my existing agents. I have extensively used Copilot, Continue, Cursor, Cline, Aider, Roo Code, and Claude Code. I've just finished porting my rules over to Claude Code and this is something I do not want to do again [even if it's as simple as dragging and dropping files].
Companies would benefit a lot by creating better onboarding flows that migrate users from other applications. It should either bring in the rules 1:1 or have an llm agent transform them into a format that works better for the agent.
You will be happy to find out that Kiro is quite good at this! One of my favorite features is "Steering Rules". Kiro can help you write steering rules for your projects, and the steering rules that it auto generates are actually super great for large projects. You can see some examples of auto generated steering files here in one of my open source projects: https://github.com/kirodotdev/spirit-of-kiro/tree/main/.kiro...
Also these steering rules are just markdown files, so you can just drop your other rules files from other tools into the `.kiro/steering` directory, and they work as is.
“I really don’t want to do X”
“Kirk is actually quite good at this: you just have to do X”
“…”
At the prompt: "I have extensively used Copilot, Continue, Cursor, Cline, Aider, Roo Code, and Claude Code. I do not want to move my files over again for Kiro [even if it's as simple as dragging and dropping files]. Do it for me"
Kiro will do it for you automatically.
And then you have two separate specifications of your intent, with the ongoing problems that causes. It’s not the same thing.
Porting rules is one of the responsibilities of keeping them.
Yeah it would be nice if there was one way to specify the rules and intent, but you know how these things go: https://xkcd.com/927/
In all seriousness, I'm sure this will become more standardized over time, in the same way that MCP has standardized tool use.
I've long been interested in something that can gather lightweight rules files from all your subdirectories as well, like a grandparent rule file that inherits and absorbs the rules of children modules that you have imported. Something kind of like this: https://github.com/ash-project/usage_rules
I think over time there will be more and more sources and entities that desire to preemptively provide some lightweight instructive steering content to guide their own use. But in the meantime we just have to deal with the standard proliferation until someone creates something amazing enough to suck everyone else in.
There should be a standard rule format in a standard place, like ~/.config/llms/rules.md
this. We need a common file for all these tools. It's not like they can not read the format of each other.
It would sure be nice to have some standardized conventions around this. AGENTS.md etc. It seems insane to have to have multiple files/rules for essentially the same goals just for different tools.
Thats the convention I am using.
My CLAUDE.md and GEMINI.md both just say "See AGENTS.md".
Have you heard about symlinks yet?
The idea of having a bunch of A100 GPU cycles needed to process the natural language equivalent of a file pointer makes me deeply sad about the current state of software development.
Same
How about:
Creating a MCP server that all the agents are configured to retrieve the rules from?
I just have a “neutral” guidance markdown setup written in a repo.
Then I add it as a git submodule to my projects and tell whatever agents to look at @llm-shared/ and update its own rule file(s) accordingly
Or a proper standard like MCP was for agentic tool use, this time for context setup...
Problems w auth / security in MCP skeeve me out. For that reason, I really don't want to invest in workflows that depend on MCP and have steered clear. But I'd be grateful for well-informed comments / advice on that front.
As for a hypothetical new "context setup" protocol like you posit, I suspect it'd benefit from the "cognitive tools" ideas in this awesome paper / project: <https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering>
^ inspiring stuff
Agents.md is at least used by both codex and GitHub copilot. VSCode has its own thing for instruction files and Claude.md is also its own thing :(
and opencode
Not Kiro related, but do your Claude Code version of rules end up as CLAUDE.md files in various locations?
in the early days of building something like that, would love to talk for 10 minutes and get your advice if you have the time? I couldn't find your email but mine is in my profile.
> have an llm agent transform them into a format that works better for the agent.
you can do this today though.