AWS Is Retiring Amazon Q Developer. The Replacement Is Kiro.

Amazon Q Developer is being discontinued. AWS posted the end-of-support announcement on April 30, 2026.

The timeline:

• May 15, 2026: New sign-ups for the Q Developer Free Tier (via IDE plugins) and new paid subscriptions are blocked. Existing subscribers can add users to current plans, but no new accounts.
• May 29, 2026: Claude Opus 4.6 is removed from Q Developer Pro. Opus 4.5 and other existing models stay. Opus 4.7 and newer models are only available through Kiro.
• April 30, 2027: Full end of support for Q Developer IDE plugins and paid subscriptions. That’s a 12-month transition window.

What’s not affected: Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console, the AWS documentation site, the Console mobile app, and Q Developer in Slack and Teams integrations. Those stay operational.

The replacement AWS is pushing is Kiro.

What Kiro Is

Kiro is an agentic IDE and CLI built around spec-driven development. Instead of starting with a prompt and iterating, Kiro converts your intent into a formal spec first. A natural-language description becomes structured requirements in EARS notation, a design based on your actual codebase, and a sequenced implementation plan with discrete tasks.

The key features AWS is highlighting:

Specs: Natural language prompts are turned into detailed requirement documents, then into architectural designs, then into dependency-ordered task lists. The idea is that the agent works from a plan rather than improvising.

Hooks: Automation triggers that fire on events like file saves. You define a rule once, and the hook runs it automatically in the background. Generate docs on save, write tests when a function changes, check code style without running anything manually.

Steering files: Project-level configuration for how Kiro agents behave. You can encode your coding standards, preferred tools, and architectural rules into a file, and the agent will respect them across sessions.

Subagents and Powers: Kiro supports custom subagents for specialized tasks and a library of composable capability modules called Powers.

Kiro also includes everything Q Developer had: agentic coding, inline chat, terminal integration, and MCP server support.

Why AWS Is Making This Move

The announcement says AWS concluded that “the most impactful AI developer experiences go far beyond code generation and completion,” requiring deeper project understanding through a purpose-built environment. That’s corporate language for: Q Developer was a feature bolted onto an IDE, and Kiro is built from scratch for a different workflow.

The practical pressure is real. Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot Workspace have all moved toward multi-step agentic workflows. Q Developer’s inline completion and chat model looks dated against those products. Kiro is AWS’s attempt to catch up with something that looks more like the emerging standard than a 2023-vintage autocomplete tool.

What Q Developer Users Should Do

If you’re on Q Developer Pro, you have until April 30, 2027 to migrate. The model situation is getting uncomfortable sooner: Opus 4.6 disappears from Q Developer Pro on May 29, and only Kiro gets Opus 4.7 and newer. So if you’re doing serious coding work and care about model quality, the effective pressure to move is much sooner than the April 2027 deadline.

Kiro is available now at kiro.dev. We covered the Kiro CLI 2.1 update in late April.

Sources: Amazon Q Developer end-of-support announcement, Kiro.dev