AI-262: Using Amazon Kiro for Agentic Coding and SDD

Course Length

2 days or 4 half days

Course Overview

AI-powered coding tools such as Amazon Kiro are rapidly transforming how software is designed, implemented, and maintained. This course teaches participants how to move beyond simple prompt-based coding and adopt a systematic, agentic approach that improves productivity without sacrificing quality, governance, or maintainability.

Participants will learn how to use Kiro's Vibe and Spec modes to implement “vibe coding” and Specification-Driven Development (SDD) respectively. SDD's structured methodology spans the whole software development life cycle (SDLC) and ensures that software development remains aligned with business intent, technical constraints, and long-term sustainability. The course combines conceptual foundations with extensive hands-on exercises, enabling participants to immediately apply these techniques to real-world projects.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• • Understand the differences between Kiro's Vibe and Spec mode
• • Understand the concepts of MCP servers and tools, and configure and use them in Kiro
• • Create new applications and modify existing ones consisting of multiple files
• • Use Kiro to create and run unit and integration tests
• • Generate documentation for applications based on source code and user prompts
• • Use Kiro for source control tasks
• • Understand the limitations of “vibe-coding” and the need for a more structured methodology which spans the whole software development life cycle (SDLC)
• • Understand the main principles, advantages and disadvantages of Specification-Driven Development (SDD)
• • Explain the meaning and importance of SDD steps
• • Use SDD in greenfield projects
• • Use SDD in brownfield projects

Main Topics

Structure

Roughly 50% lecture, 50% hands on lab exercises. The lab exercises are executables with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, C# or C/C++.

Target Audience

Software developers and testers as well as their technical managers who want to understand and use Kiro in “vibe coding” and spec-driven software development.

Prerequisites

• • Experience with VS Code or similar IDEs
• • Experience using ChatGPT or similar chat-based AI tools
• • Basic knowledge of the programming language used during the lab exercises