Free agents: How AWS Kiro could untie agents from editors
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AWS Kiro decouples coding agents from editors, a paradigm shift for AI agent workflows and platform engineering.
AWS Kiro replaced three separate agent harnesses (TypeScript, Rust, Python) with a single standalone agent process communicating via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), an open standard co-developed by Zed and JetBrains. By adopting ACP even for first-party components, AWS treats the client-agent boundary as a standardized interface rather than a proprietary one, enabling developers to choose coding tools and AI agents independently. Microsoft and JetBrains are converging on the same architectural pattern, mirroring how the Language Server Protocol decoupled editors from language intelligence.