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Amazon has just released a new AI code editor named Kira. It's in public preview and free to use. In this video, I'll show you how to use it and also give you the three reasons I think it has a bit of a leg up over its competitors. Other VS Code forks like Cursor and Windsurf. Let's go. I'm at the Curo website. If we look at pricing here, it's going to say Kira continues to remain free with reasonable limits during the preview period. And because this utilizes Cloud 4, this is a really good opportunity to use it for free. You will notice there's no way to download from here. All you can do is join the wait list. Definitely add your name to the list, but I'll show you a way, no guarantees or anything, that you might be able to get access right away. If you're on a Mac, you could use homebrew with the command brew install kirao. So, you can see here to download the latest version of Kuro installed it, moved to my applications folder. So, so Kira is an actual application. It's not just a website or web app you go to. It's actually a VS Code fork. So, this will get you that app installed on your computer. From there, you can loging in with either Google account, GitHub account, or AWS account. There's probably an equivalent for Windows. I'm not too familiar with that. And by the time you see this, you might just be able to download it from the website. So, no guarantee. That's just something that works for some people. So, I've launched Curo. And one of the reasons I think it's got a bit of a leg up on some of the AI code editors like Cursor, for example, is because when you build, it actually walks you through the software development life cycle. We see this here on the first page. page. I'm in an empty directory and it lets you either vibe code here or spec. I'm going to choose spec and then I'm just going to put in some rough notes about what I want to build. And so at this point, you can put in the technologies if you know it. But if not, just let AI tell you how to build it. But in this case, I'm going to ask it to build next.js application. I'm use authentication by a product called Clerk, which I've had a lot of success with in the past. And for a database, I'm going to use Neon. And I want to build an application that I can add retail locations to and then use those retail locations to publish a map on a website. So you can see all the stores that my products listed in. So now the first thing it's going to do because we chose that spec mode is it's going to build a requirements file. And this is much more in line with my experience in software development in real life at a real corporation. I do this a long time and you never just start vibe coding. You always start with at least some level of documentation. It's broken down my notes for my requirements very nicely. Numbered the requirements. Even made user stories acceptance criteria for all of them. It's broke it down to seven unique requirements. So that's great. So now you can just say move to design phase. So after requirements now it's going to take you to design phase where it's going to build a design document for you. And like I was saying like if you're in a corporate environment for example you always go through these steps and even if you're doing an agile workflow you still have at least user stories and some basic documentation before you get started. And there you go. Let's build this a design document. It even included like little mermaid diagrams with all the components which is really cool because the technology stack. It defines all our core components, even our API calls. Everything's in here. This is really good. That design document looks great. Now, I can just click move to implementation plan. Now, it's going to take that design document and break it down into individual tasks to actually do the coding. Now, now it's built our implementation plan or a task list. One thing I find really cool about Curo is it's turned this what is basically a markdown file into an interactive wizard. So, I can actually click here, start task, and it's actually going to launch it for me. So, makes it better than just having a just a normal markdown file. It really sets it up so you can track exactly what's going on. I also like how it links requirements back to all the different implementation tasks. Now it's done all that planning, we should be able to have a much better end product with our first iteration. So now you can just implement all the tasks in the order. And then a really nice thing is after a task is complete, you can actually say view changes. It's going to bring up a window that shows you for all the files it changed, all the different changes it made. You can also use the view execution button. It takes you right back to the chat to where it did that task. Then you can review if something went wrong. You can know exactly where in the chat the changes started. You'll notice here it is using Cloud Sonnet 4.0 totally for free which is pretty amazing. It has been the slow side right now. So you have to be a bit patient with it. I'm going to let it cook away in the rest of these tasks and see what it gives me. Did take a while to get through all those tasks but once I did and I got the API keys entered for all the integrations. I have working application here. I can sign in with Google and I can search for businesses add them to my list of locations and stores them all my neon database. In the end, those worked out much better if than if I just started vibe coding. That spec mode is really good. And the second feature that I find Kira does really well is around how they implemented hooks. So in Ko on the left sidebar, if you go down to this ghost icon, this is the Kuro section, you have a whole section for agent hooks. And what hooks are is a way to monitor for events to happen. And then when those events happen, do something. Let's add a new hook here. And the reason I really like how Kira did this is they let you in natural language describe what you want the hook to be. So you can probably think of all kinds of use cases. You could do a security scan after you update your code. You could run your test suite. In this case, I'm going to try to update my documentation. So actually they give you a little shortcut here and say update my documentation. And what it says is on change on these files, ask the agent to make changes to docs in either the readme or if there's specific docs folder, update there, too. So now with that prompt, Kira's actually built the hook for us. It knows we're in a TypeScript file, so it's looking for those. It adds all the different file paths to the watch list and gives instructions to the agent. Now that Kira has done an update to one of the TSX files for a prompt I did. Now we can see the agent hook running automatically. Then we can see here actually completely rewritten to provide a compromise overview of the application, including the new admin panel access method via the gear icon, which is what I have prompted it to do. This is so cool. And the final reason I think Kira has a big step up versus some of its competitors like cursor or wind surf is by who makes it. So it's made by AWS which is from Amazon, Amazon web services. Amazon also has a big shareholder in Anthropic which is the maker of the cloud 4 models and then Amazon has so much money obviously to spend on AI they can really invest in Kuro and the money spent on the API tokens from Anthropic they're going to get back anyway as part of that profit from that company. So that it's kind of a nice circle there and that's the problem like cursor and winds surf are kind of running into is that since Cloud 4 is the best model at least right now for AI coding everyone just wants to use that and that's really where all the value is in the in the IDE and we saw this dramatically shown recently with Windsurf when Anthropic released Cloud 4 they didn't let Windsurf use it right in the IDE you have to use your own API credits as a user so you have to pay anthropic directly and when that happened use of Windsurf went way down obviously So they're kind of beholden to anthropic as a problem and Amazon, AWS and Kira is not going to have that problem. So I think it's going to be around for the long term. Double-edged sword of course because that is a lot of concentration just a few massive tech companies but it is what it is right now. And as a consumer I think Kira's got a bright future. So make sure you subscribe to the channel. Everything to do with AI software development I'm going to cover it here. I hope you're having an amazing day. I'll talk to you the next