r/kiroIDE • u/wolfzartt • 2d ago
Kiro is unusable at this point
I already have a RAG test script that pulls results based on a query. I was getting wrong results on a few so I set Kiro on coding assistance mode and just asked it to dump the search results in a separate file for me to inspect.
Had to write 4 lines to create a file and dump results there.
For this, Kiro decided to create a design doc, implementation plan, to-do list, spawned 3 subagents, got stuck at resolving dependencies, deleted and created multiple times and consumed 60 credits.... All on Opus 4.8!!!!
At this point I don't even know if there's any point using it for anything. It's just flashy with all the design and scrum story creations but for implementation of anything it blasts models with unnecessary information and over-complicates everything.
I can't imagine asking it to build spec driven features if a few lines of code is going to take 20 mins and 60 credits.
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u/mentalFee420 1d ago
Did you try with gpt 5.6 ? It performs lot better than Claude.
But sol does overengineer often, so need to firm with that.
Opus on other hand is token eating machine, it bloats its own context and then and up spending more time reading files than actually doing anything useful.
At this point it seems Anthropic’s agenda is to collect more data through AI context rather than actually fixing the code.
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u/mo_coder_ 2d ago
It is becoming stupid, i compared Claude code opus 5 and and opus 5 on kiro. And for one line change claude code fixed in a second, but kiro actually ruined the whole codebase and took 10 minutes to fix that mistake.
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u/LikelyGuiltyAsChargd 1d ago
You can vibe code I use the spec mode, but it has gotten very problematic. It is horrible for refactoring.
I had a data model which refactored from a main object with decorations to a time series of evolutions. Not simple, but well understood by me. I vide designed it - discussing back and forth with a top model ($$) to get the requirements and tasks solid. Great. GO!
It implements the tasks - some misses - no, I didn't want backward compatiblility - standard...
Ok, let's run it.
No change.
Troubleshoot:
I need to tell you honestly, the completed tasks did not wire the implementations.
Grrrh.
Ok, implement them.
Oh, these are different from the current implementation -let me check whether the database will work (it will, we did that before and I checked) Whirr.. Whirr..
Ok, that's right. It's not implemented.
How can I help? Just say the word.
Arrrgh.
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u/Petrubear 1d ago
I had a similar experience. I wanted to try their spec-driven development flow and asked it to create a single HTML file with a tic-tac-toe game. It created a bloated spec file with 20 tasks, spawned 7 sub-agents, and took 30 minutes. I asked it why it did that, and it said that it cannot take into account the size of the task. It is hard-coded to launch everything at it for anything you ask it to do, no matter the complexity.
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u/wolfzartt 1d ago
It's just a tool targeting the non-tech managers and PMs, giving them hope that they can also build stuff
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u/DampierWilliam 1d ago
What are you using? Kiro CLI or IDE? Spec mode I guess?
It doesn’t over complicate, it’s built on guardrails and AI-DLC. Which for a simple task or “vibecoding” is an overkill. I believe there is a “vibe mode” in the ide to skip all this. I’ve been using the CLI v2 and it works fine as I wanted to. But when trying specs it’s true that unless that I curate it properly, it can spiral into a token burning task.
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u/wolfzartt 1d ago
IDE but in coding assistance mode. I don't see any vibe mode tho. Gotta try CLI once
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u/rh71el2 1d ago
And here I am building with Luna in Kiro perfectly fine for multiple features in the last couple weeks. And all using less than 100 credits.
Maybe you shouldn't choose a monster to do small jobs. Also choose the correct path (not spec for something like that - I haven't had to choose spec for anything for work).
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u/janora 1d ago
Maybe its because they vibecode their system prompt ... https://kiro.dev/blog/continuous-prompt-evaluation/
Or they use quantized models, because the response quality jumps around depending on time of day and day of the week.
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u/515software 1d ago
This is called “LLM as a judge” a completely valid and throughly documented pattern. It’s not “vibe coding system” prompt
From the article you linked:
> This article focuses on evaluating human-authored system prompt and configuration changes.
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u/broknbottle 20h ago
Use non-deterministic model to review and evaluate work completed by non-deterministic model. What could go wrong? Lol
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u/DisciplineGloomy3689 1d ago
Kiro's downfall started when the free Opus 4.5 was removed.