Kiro bots: what they are and how to use them
2026-11-07 · 4 min read
Kiro bots are named, long-running AI agents inside Kiro Crew, the open source agent workspace from AWS's Kiro team, and each one owns a single recurring job such as issue triage or build health. To use one, you install Kiro Crew, open the bots workspace in the sidebar, add a bot on top of the default or a custom agent, and then tell it in chat what to watch and how often.
The post that launched it
On November 5, @kirodotdev announced bots as "self-improving agents for distinct roles," giving channel watch, issue triage and deploy guard as examples. The pitch was that each bot "builds expertise with every run," keeps its own memory and runs parallel sessions, "so you delegate processes instead of tasks."
Kiro's launch post the same day says bots are "generally available in Kiro Crew." Per the v0.12.0 release notes, bots are the renamed Mates feature, now on for everyone.
Kiro introduced Crew in August as an open source workspace that "runs on your hardware," born as an internal Amazon tool called MeshClaw. Kiro says it reached more than 39,000 builders inside the company in under six months.
What a bot actually does
Kiro defines a bot as "a named, long-running agent that you define and customize for a specific part of your work." Every bot gets a name, an avatar, one ongoing chat, its own workspace, private memory and its own model choice. You can pick a different model for the worker agents it spins up.
Kiro's own examples show how narrow each job is meant to be:
| Bot | What it does | What it can't do |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | Labels issues, flags likely duplicates, drafts repro steps | Close tickets |
| Build health | Checks CI every 30 minutes, separates new failures from known flaky tests | Not stated |
| Code review | Checks PRs against past decisions, comments, requests changes | Approve or merge |
| Release readiness | Runs the pre-release checklist, asks for sign-off | Ship without sign-off |
I'd pay more attention to the right-hand column than the left. The limits are part of the job description.
How to try Kiro bots
- Install Kiro Crew. The GitHub README has a one-line installer (
curl -fsSL https://download.crew.kiro.dev/cli.sh | sh), and then you openhttp://localhost:5476. There's also a Docker image and desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux. - Sign in. Crew runs on the Kiro CLI, which needs a one-time sign-in with a Kiro account (
kiro-cli login). - Open the bots workspace in the Crew sidebar, add a bot, and pick the default agent or a custom one as its base.
- Give it a job and a schedule in plain chat. Two prompts modeled on Kiro's examples: "Check CI every 30 minutes and tell me only about new failures, not known flaky tests," or "Every Friday, draft release notes from this week's merged PRs."
- Look at its memory. Kiro says you can view, edit or delete anything a bot remembers, so do that in the first week, before bad assumptions pile up.
Bots run wherever Crew runs: Kiro lists "your laptop, a Mac Mini, or an EC2 instance." A bot meant to work around the clock belongs on a machine that doesn't go to sleep.
What it costs
Kiro Crew itself is free, Apache 2.0 software, but it "needs a Kiro plan to run," and there's no separate metering for Crew. Bots spend the same credits as everything else on your plan. Per Kiro's pricing page:
- Free: $0, 50 credits a month
- Pro: $20 per user, 1,000 credits
- Pro+: $40, 2,000 credits; Pro Max: $100, 5,000; Power: $200, 10,000
- Extra credits: $0.04 each on paid plans
The Crew page also says scheduled jobs that only run a script or command, with no model call, use no requests at all. If a bot calls a model on every 30-minute check, that adds up fast, so keep routine checks as plain scripts and save the model for the steps that need judgment.
My read
Kiro bots make the same bet as Microsoft's always-on Copilot agents and Perplexity Teammates: the agent stays on and you check in with it. The difference is that Kiro's is open source and runs on your own machine.
Look at permissions before trusting the defaults. Kiro says each bot gets only the tools its job needs and must ask before getting more, yet the settings screenshot in the launch post shows permissions set to "Trust." If a bot will run on your workstation, read our note on what local agents can reach first.
What this means for businesses
The pattern travels well beyond software teams. "Watch this, flag that, never approve anything" works for invoices, intake forms and follow-ups in any office. Start with one narrow job, give it read and comment access only, and widen it once it has earned more. If you want help figuring out which of your recurring tasks fit that pattern, New Face Design offers a free process audit.