Yesterday, AWS published a quiet blog post flagging a significant shift in how Amazon thinks about AI-assisted development. Amazon Q Developer — the IDE plugin that replaced CodeWhisperer in 2024 — is being discontinued. New signups are blocked as of May 15, 2026. Full end of support arrives April 30, 2027. The successor is called Kiro.
This isn’t a patch or a rebrand. It’s a strategic pivot, and understanding it matters if your team builds on AWS.
What happened and when
The timeline is tight and worth knowing:
- May 15, 2026: New signups blocked. You can’t create a new Free Tier account or a new Pro subscription.
- May 29, 2026: Claude Opus 4.6 is retired from Q Developer Pro. Opus 4.5 and earlier models remain. Opus 4.7 and future models are exclusive to Kiro.
- April 30, 2027: Q Developer IDE plugins and paid subscriptions reach full end of support. 12 months to migrate.
What doesn’t change: Amazon Q within the AWS Management Console, the documentation site, the mobile app, and integrations with Slack and Teams continue. The sunset applies specifically to the IDE plugin experience.
Why AWS built Kiro
The official justification is straightforward. AWS writes that Q Developer “proved that AI belongs in the inner loop of software development” — but that the most impactful AI experiences require understanding the complete project: architecture, requirements, tests, and intent. A coding assistant reacting to individual prompts didn’t cut it.
Kiro is built around spec-driven development. Instead of responding to loose prompts, Kiro works from structured specifications that define requirements, guide implementation, and establish acceptance criteria — all before writing a single line of code.
The key primitives:
- Specs: Natural language requirements formalized in EARS notation (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax). You describe what you want; Kiro converts it into structured requirements with explicit constraints and acceptance criteria.
- Hooks: Automatic triggers on file save, commit, or custom events. Tests run, documentation updates, code standards get applied — without manual intervention.
- Steering files: Project-level configuration that gives Kiro persistent context about your architecture, conventions, and constraints. Think of it as a structured CLAUDE.md — but native to the environment.
- Custom subagents: Specialized agents for domain-specific tasks — security review, API contract validation, infrastructure provisioning.
- Powers: Composable capability modules that extend Kiro’s agentic behavior for specific workflows.
Kiro also preserves everything from Q Developer: agentic coding, inline chat, terminal integration, MCP support. It runs on Claude Sonnet 4.5 or an Auto mode that blends frontier models to balance quality, latency, and cost. It’s compatible with VS Code settings and Open VSX plugins.
My take
The pivot is coherent. The tools war of 2024-2025 — where every coding assistant competed on autocomplete speed and chat quality — matured. Differentiation now lives at the workflow layer: how the tool understands your project, not just your cursor.
AWS is betting that spec-driven development is where serious teams are headed. The bet has merit. Prompt-reactive assistants hit a ceiling in complex, long-lived codebases. Kiro’s approach — forcing explicit requirements before execution, maintaining persistent architectural context, automating quality through hooks — is sound from an architectural standpoint.
That said, there are real costs for existing users. The 12-month window is reasonable but not generous for enterprise teams with established Q Developer workflows. The model parity gap also matters: locking Opus 4.7 and future models exclusively to Kiro is a clear forcing function, not a gentle suggestion.
For Latin American teams running on AWS infrastructure, the relevant question isn’t whether to evaluate Kiro — it’s when. Given the May 15 signup cutoff, new developers on your team can’t start with Q Developer anyway. The evaluation window is now.
What to do
If you’re currently using Amazon Q Developer, nothing breaks immediately. Existing subscriptions remain valid through April 2027. But given the model freeze coming May 29, there’s no compelling reason to onboard new team members to Q Developer at this point.
Download Kiro at kiro.dev. AWS published a migration guide for VS Code, JetBrains, and Eclipse. The CLI was also rebranded — Kiro CLI 1.20 replaces the Q CLI, with a built-in “auto” model option.
For teams not yet using either tool: skip Q Developer entirely. Kiro is where AWS is investing.