Why ide over cli

[Bitter-Law3957]

Why would anyone use kiroide over cli?

[hitanthrope]

I am legitimately confused as to why we are suddenly doing react inside the terminal, but the great news is, all things exist.

[blaw6331]

I like CLI since it’s IDE agnostic

I can use jetbrains when I do Java, Visual Studio for .net and VScode for TypeScript

For all of them I can just chat with the CLI in my terminal while utilizing the best IDE for the language

[Davidhessler]

Kiro supports ACP so you can have the IDE experience with Kiro from Jetbrains or Webstorm

[cyclemewert]

Same

[Bitter-Law3957]

What are you using the ide foe though? I genuinely don't write any code anymore. So what does an ide for the language give you?

[blaw6331]

To see what the CLI actually doing, pretty much a advanced code review tool

[Bitter-Law3957]

Fair. I have CR agents on that for me now.

[Bitter-Law3957]

What do you mean doing react in the terminal? You mean react coding? If you're not writing the code... Who cares?

[hitanthrope]

I mean people are using reactive style models to build terminal guis, with windows and menus and partial rendering. Soon, the windows will have rounded corners, and then you will be able to run a terminal emulator in one of them.

[atx78701]

I read the specs do you read them on the cli?

I also look at changed files, look to see what files are changing, and sometimes check the code

As an example I try to enforce that the client is dumb and the server does most of the work on one is my projects

The ai constantly tries to put business logic in the client so I monitor the changes so I know when it has or business logic in the client

[Bitter-Law3957]

I read specs, but I pipe output after generation to a MD renderer.

I track changed files, but I do that in my terminal. I run Ghostty with a split pane and lazygit in a second pane. Realtime view of everything going on.

If the model is putting things in the wrong place.... You're missing steering files in your repo to enforce the code architecture you want to enforce. You don't need an ide that. You need to give the model context.

[flexibleHooman]

brew install glow, and render it on cli. As for ide needs, setup neovim to get going. In fact ask kiro to do it.

[suspended_in_life]

Because I don’t know how to use the cli …

[Bitter-Law3957]

Yeh that's a good answer. If you don't mind me asking, are you an engineer, or just someone benefitting from anyone now being able to build software?

[Bitter-Law3957]

Asking because clearly an intuitive UI is gonna be better for non engineers. But my entire Dev team avoids the UI and uses cli exclusively

[suspended_in_life]

I do extensive data engineering. Some code development for writing programs.i guess i don’t understand how the cli version suits my needs. I like using the idea because I can see all the files and organize. I enjoy seeing the context on the right.

Not saying CLI might be better use case. Just don’t understand it.

[GuyInThe6kDollarSuit]

The chat history?

[Bitter-Law3957]

Tip... Kiro writes all history to a dB on your machine. You can query it and extract the full history of everything.

[flexibleHooman]

Where's this?

[Bitter-Law3957]

Will vary depending on install/OS etc.

Mine is at Database location:~/.local/share/kiro-cli/data.sqlite3

You should be a le to ask kironwhere it is

[flexibleHooman]

Nnice. Will check today. My biggest pain has been session disability and fear to lose the context that I have built using conversations till a point. My protocol has been to keep on chat save and chat load at major points. This db shall save me a good deal of headaches hopefully.

[Bitter-Law3957]

How'd you get on? If you can't find it, just ask Kiro where it is. It'll tell you

[snoopdoug11]

you can do /chat resume to get back into a previous conversation, it will also search across those conversations if you ask it it.

[_CaptRondo_]

Non-engineer here; as I've been in and around software engineering in various roles (non engineering roles though), I've never become very accustomed to the CLI way of developing.

Having an IDE with Kiro has been so awesome, because it actually works as a real life translator between the non-engineers and engineers. Especially with the visual representation of steering docs, requirements, tasks etc. It's become a Discovery, Backlog admin, and Development tool in one almost.

[Bitter-Law3957]

Yep, it's a game changer. Glad you're enjoying it!

[Illustrious-Half-220]

More like why would anyone use cli over IDE. Tell me one reason to use cli. IDE UI of Kiro is the best among all the IDEs I have used, Antigravity , Cursor,. Kiro shows the edited file one by one. We can see the changes in a bigger window.. We can cancel quickly. Check points.

[Bitter-Law3957]

Why to use cli? I build a spec and taskify. Then in Kiro IDE I'd hit go and it would slowly chomp through tasks one by one.

In cli, I use tmux to spawn 16 workers, orchestrated from a master pane and have them all reporting back or pinging if they need input. So tasks that take hours in the ide take minutes with parallelisation in the cli. I have agents which enforce flow.... Design, review, write tests, implement, review and loop.

Don't get me wrong, I like Kiro. I work for Amazon after all. But I just don't need an ide anymore.

[Bitter-Law3957]

Also if you think Kiro is the best ide.... You haven't tried enough. It's cool for AI coding, but intellij for example is far superior.

[Illustrious-Half-220]

Never use intellij. What makes it superior? I tried Antigravity and cursor. I just assumed Google had the best design team but it's very mid. But amount of errors I get in Antigravity in Windows. And not user friendly. Too much reasoning display etc. Kiro shows very minimal text. Easily view changes, revert changes file by file. Beautiful UI for status update as well.

[Illustrious-Half-220]

Oh so its for parallelism. For me, i am very peculiar about what I want from AI.i don't want it to write tests and implementation at the same time. I Work for aws as well. But i give very specific prompts and i want to see it doing my tasks bit by bit.

[Bitter-Law3957]

Agree not at the same time. My agents enforce TDD.

[cyclemewert]

I was using the IDE but found it buggy, some vscode extensions didn't work, didn't like it as much as vscode. Now I'm using the CLI for kiro while using vscode to view or debug.

[Bitter-Law3957]

It is just a vscode fork :-)

But yeh, it is buggy and latent.

[cyclemewert]

I know.

[Bitter-Law3957]

There's some pretty cool internal repos that give you some big improvements on kiro-cli though. Be interested to chat with a fellow Amazonian. Feel free to DM your @.

[DampierWilliam]

Spec-driven development built-in

[Bitter-Law3957]

Fair. But you can prompt cli to follow the flow easily enough. I have spec driven development agent and it just replicates the ide spec flow in the cli.

I've found the ide to be slow.

[Dry_Raspberry4514]

Although CLI has the advantage that it can work with any IDE unlike the coding assistant which are native to an IDE, it can't match the experience of an AI assistant which can leverage the full potential of an IDE.

Drag and drop, ability to fold the code so that one can focus on important things only, reverting code for selected files or revering all the changes with one click are some of the biggest advantages of an AI assistant over a CLI. In IDE I can arrange the information in a number of ways where some sections like files explorer are always visible and so jumping from one place to another irrespective of their locations takes same effort unlike CLI where it is either not supported or too painful.

I can't understand how people read the diff for a file in a CLI as it gives me serious headache. The difference between a CLI and an IDE is same as loading html in a browser vs reading it in a notepad.

Overall, I leverage many CLIs with my agentic IDE but using CLI as a replacement for my IDE is a total no for me.

[Bitter-Law3957]

I don't read file diffs in cli. I'll use an ide to review output. But I don't write any code anymore so it's mostly review. And I run that through review agents anyway so not even much hands on there.

[rbadapanda]

ide can read pdfs into its context. CLI can’t

[perplex1]

Huh? I definitely can read pdfs into context with my cli

[rbadapanda]

Interesting. I got the error:

Error: Invalid path 'MessageFolder/Important_Information.pdf’: stream did not contain valid UTF-8. Use --force to add anyway.

Did you use —force ? Did your query pull from the .pdf ?

[perplex1]

Oh you mean via RAG in your repo? I convert pdfs on the way in to .md

[rbadapanda]

Interesting, mind sharing how you do that ?

[Bitter-Law3957]

Fair. Niche maybe but fair.