Coder Brings Governance to Kiro IDE with Centralized MCP

Kiro IDE by Amazon joins the growing lineup of agentic IDEs built on VS Code. Kiro takes a different approach, emphasizing spec-driven development — planning before coding. It’s currently powered by Claude Sonnet, with more models on the roadmap.

It automatically generates detailed requirements, design documentation, and discrete tasks upfront, giving you clear visibility into what the AI intends to build before writing any code. Other great features include agent hooks, fine-grained steering, and multi-modal inputs, making Kiro a compelling choice for teams looking to build with structure and control.

Using Kiro? Ask your Coder admin to add the Kiro module to your template. This enables an “Open in Kiro” button inside your workspace.

Use the Coder Remote VS Code Extension and open-remote-ssh extension for establishing connections to Coder workspaces.

Why use Kiro with Coder? Integrating Kiro with Coder workspaces unlocks key benefits for admins, including:

Remote vs local setup

Launch the Kiro client locally and connect to Coder's cloud dev environments. Developers skip complex local setup — getting onboarded fast, with collaboration built in. Coder is fully self-hosted which means it inherits all security policies of your own environment further helping with any air-gapped or industry accreditation requirements.

Standardization and governance

Coder employs Terraform to create templates for reproducible, development environments called Coder workspaces, helping with version control and standardization of both your infrastructure and the environment. Admins can add modules like Kiro from the Coder Registry, with audit logging, identity federation, and tool usage controls built in.

Fast and consistent MCP tooling

With Coder’s Kiro integration, configure MCP servers directly into template code, adding organization-specific context — no login delays, no workflow disruptions. It scales with your team, Kiro automatically detects and loads your MCP servers from the configuration file. This approach speeds up developer onboarding without needing any manual configuration steps every time.

Configure MCP server for Kiro

Provide a JSON-encoded string via the mcp input. When set, the module writes the value to ~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json using a coder_script on workspace start.

After you apply the configuration to your environment, every workspace is automatically set up to let Kiro connect to MCP servers. This requires no developer intervention and ensures consistency across all environments.

The following example configures Kiro to use the GitHub MCP server with authentication facilitated by the coderexternalauth resource.

Kiro supports both “vibe coding” and structured, spec-driven workflows. Coder makes it easy to deploy Kiro and other tools in a secure, enterprise-ready environment that scales with your team.

Getting started with Kiro IDE in Coder

• Add Kiro IDE in under a minute: https://registry.coder.com/modules/coder/kiro
• MCP configuration and best practices for Kiro: https://kiro.dev/docs/mcp/configuration
• For any inquiries or support, please open an issue here or join our Discord community.