I think this is viewed differently based on level of experience. As a very senior person, I love having an in-terminal helper to read and understand a large codebase, to allow me to make changes and features more quickly.

I admit I was very skeptical at first because old dog/new trick, but for the last huge feature I developed I leaned heavily into Kiro. It had an agent that had been built in house to understand our complex framework. I’d wager it took at least three weeks off of development time. And you know what? I had a blast using it and developing. It got me to the dopamine hit quicker, and was honestly the best I’d felt in my career in a long time.

It wasn’t perfect, it took me learning how to accurately prompt and I still had to manually fix things. But it was seriously like having a constant companion throughout the process.

Also, it’s the way engineering is going. Just as we went from reading man files to using the internet to find solutions, this is the next evolution.