Kiro CLI is an AI-assisted terminal tool for AWS, rebranded from Amazon Q Developer CLI in November 2025. It sits on top of your existing AWS credentials and tooling. The q and q chat shortcuts from Q CLI still work but kiro-cli is the current entry point.

Install

macOS

brew install --cask kiro-cli

Or via script:

curl -fsSL https://cli.kiro.dev/install | bash

Windows (PowerShell)

irm 'https://cli.kiro.dev/install.ps1' | iex

Linux / WSL2 (Ubuntu / Debian) - .deb

wget https://desktop-release.q.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/latest/kiro-cli.deb
sudo dpkg -i kiro-cli.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

Linux - ZIP (x86-64, non-Debian distros)

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf \
  'https://desktop-release.q.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/latest/kirocli-x86_64-linux.zip' \
  -o kirocli.zip
unzip kirocli.zip
./kirocli/install.sh

Verify:

kiro-cli version
kiro-cli doctor   # diagnoses config and auth issues

Authenticate

kiro-cli login     # opens browser to complete sign-in
kiro-cli whoami    # shows current user and auth method
kiro-cli logout

AWS Builder ID - free individual account at builder.aws. No existing AWS account required. Enough to get started with 50 free credits/month (500 bonus credits on first sign-in).

Builder ID with AWS accounts - You can log in to Kiro with a personal Builder ID for the AI features, and connect to your AWS account using AWS SSO profile. Kiro picks up AWS credentials are active in the environment:

Set the profile for the session and run commands targeting the profile:

export AWS_PROFILE=my-prod
aws sts get-caller-identity              # confirm which account is active
aws sts get-caller-identity --profile my-prod
kiro-cli chat "get Compute Optimizer recommendations"

Key commands

kiro-cli with no arguments opens an interactive session - type prompts directly without any prefix. kiro-cli chat "prompt" is for scripted or one-shot use.

kiro-cli                          # interactive session - type prompts directly
kiro-cli chat "your prompt"       # start session with an initial prompt
kiro-cli chat --resume            # continue previous session
kiro-cli chat --no-interactive "prompt"  # one-shot, no interaction - useful in scripts
kiro-cli translate "list S3 buckets"    # natural language to shell command
kiro-cli agent list               # list available agents
kiro-cli mcp add                  # add an MCP server
kiro-cli mcp list                 # list configured MCP servers
kiro-cli mcp status               # check MCP server health
kiro-cli settings list            # view current settings
kiro-cli update                   # upgrade to latest version

Infrastructure workflows

Kiro CLI does not call AWS APIs directly - it generates and optionally runs commands using your existing AWS credentials. A few patterns that work well:

Generate and run AWS CLI commands from natural language:

kiro-cli translate "list all EC2 instances in us-east-1 with their state"
# outputs: aws ec2 describe-instances --region us-east-1 --query ...

Pipe AWS CLI output into chat for analysis:

aws cloudwatch describe-alarms --state-value ALARM | \
  kiro-cli chat --no-interactive "summarise these alarms and suggest remediation"

Generate Terraform or CloudFormation:

kiro-cli chat "write a Terraform module for a private S3 bucket with versioning and a 90-day lifecycle rule to Glacier"

Use in CI without interaction:

KIRO_API_KEY=ksk_xxxxxxxx kiro-cli chat --no-interactive \
  "explain this deployment error: $(cat deploy.log | tail -50)"

Run commands with auto-approval in trusted environments:

kiro-cli chat --trust-all-tools "get Compute Optimizer recommendations for my account"

Notes

  1. If migrating from Q CLI, config migrates automatically from ~/.aws/amazonq to ~/.kiro on first run.
  2. kiro-cli doctor is the first thing to run if auth or config behaves unexpectedly.
  3. The CLI is not open source - the license changed from Apache to AWS Intellectual Property License with the Kiro rebrand.