That honor goes to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, at least as measured by Stack Overflow's 2026 Developer Survey. Kiro might rank 27th among the listed IDEs, but then it's not really an IDE anymore.
Having shrugged off reports that it played a role in outages last year, Kiro now styles itself "an agentic development environment" after a brief stint as "an agentic IDE." It's also the inheritor of Amazon Q Developer coding assistant users, who have been directed to migrate to Kiro.
It's also "an AI-powered development environment that helps you build software from prototype to production." It's "available as a desktop IDE, a command-line interface, a web app, a mobile app, and a personal AI agent (Crew)."
Except that Kiro Crew is also "the persistent, open source development workspace." It's more agent infrastructure – an environment – that supports Kiro Web, IDE, and CLI.
To help get Kiro through its identity crisis and perhaps make it more beloved, AWS is expanding Kiro's remit still further. The cloud giant is launching Kiro Crew bots, recalling similar efforts like OpenAI dots and Grok Bot, as well as Claude Duet and Meta Muse.
