Unofficial companion for the Kiro CLI: manage the rules, specs, permissions, agents, skills and MCP servers Kiro uses from the sidebar, and chat with kiro-cli in a terminal beside your code. Requires kiro-cli from kiro.dev.
Installation
Launch VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P), paste the following command, and press enter.
Manage everything Kiro uses from the VS Code sidebar, and chat with kiro-cli in a terminal beside your code. Windows, macOS and Linux.
Requires kiro-cli from kiro.dev. Community extension, not an official Kiro product.
Getting started
Install kiro-cli and run kiro-cli login (or use Kiro: Set API Key).
Click the >_ icon in the activity bar to see what Kiro uses in this project, or run Kiro: Open Chat.
The sidebar: what Kiro uses
kiro-cli reads its configuration from files in .kiro/ (this project) and ~/.kiro/ (all projects). The What Kiro Uses view lists them in one place, updates as the files change, and opens any file with a click.
Rules: your conventions in .kiro/steering/ or ~/.kiro/steering/. New Rule walks you through where the rule applies and what to call it. Open Rules Folder gets you to the files.
Specs: every feature plan in .kiro/specs/, with how many of its three docs exist. Plan a feature… starts a new one.
Permissions: tool rules for this workspace and for all projects, with the rule count and policies. If a file doesn't exist yet, create… starts it from a commented template.
Custom Agents, Skills and MCP Servers: what's configured, at project or global level, including disabled MCP servers.
Chat and specs
Chat:Kiro: Open Chat runs kiro-cli chat in a terminal beside your editor. Every kiro-cli chat feature works as-is: slash commands, models, agents and tool permissions.
Plan a Feature (Spec): starts a Kiro chat that writes requirements → design → tasks to .kiro/specs/<name>/, asking Kiro to stop for your review after each step. The spec shows up in the sidebar as it's written.
API key:Kiro: Set API Key stores it in VS Code SecretStorage and passes it to kiro-cli as KIRO_API_KEY.
Settings
kiro.cliPath: path to kiro-cli (auto-detected if empty).
kiro.workingDirectory: folder kiro-cli starts in.
kiro.chatArguments: extra kiro-cli chat arguments, e.g. ["--v3"] or ["--agent", "my-agent"].
Troubleshooting
CLI not found: see Output → Kiro CLI, then set kiro.cliPath.
Stuck or signed out: run Kiro: Restart CLI for a fresh session.
