AWS Kiro, the cloud giant’s AI-oriented integrated development environment, isn’t the most popular code editor. 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. Bots in Kiro Crew are software agents that attempt to carry out long-running tasks. "A bot is a new way to structure and drive agentic work," a Kiro blog post explains. "Instead of working in isolated sessions, each bot is a named, long-running agent that you define and customize for a specific part of your work. It has its own memory and runs its own sessions so you stop tracking them one by one. Kiro Crew already learns from how you work. Bots change where that learning lives." There’s some appealing anthropomorphism to giving each agent a name and its own tools, permissions, and memories. You’re suddenly surrounded by friends…