Kiro Power for AI-Driven Development Life Cycle (AI-DLC)
Bring AI-DLC's structured, spec-driven development workflows directly into Kiro IDE — where AI does the heavy lifting with human oversight at every phase.
Overview: AI-DLC (AI-Driven Development Life Cycle)
AI-DLC is an adaptive, three-phase software development workflow that guides structured development with built-in quality gates and human approvals at each step:
- Inception — What to build and why: workspace detection, reverse engineering (for brownfield), requirements analysis, user stories, application design
- Construction — How to build it: per-unit functional design → NFR requirements → NFR design → infrastructure design → code generation → build and test
- Operations — Deployment and monitoring (placeholder for future expansion)
Why the KIRO Power for AI-DLC matters
Adding AI-DLC steering files to projects today is manual — teams individually configure and populate Kiro steering files with AI-DLC rules, which is time-consuming and error-prone. We've seen significant time lost to this during Unicorn Gyms and use-case builds across multiple teams. This Power automates the entire process, providing a faster path to integrating AI-DLC rules and helping scale adoption of the methodology significantly.
Key Traits
- Adaptive: Only runs stages that add value to your request — simple changes stay lightweight, complex ones get full treatment.
- Structured prompts: Multiple-choice questions are written to files (not chat) so you can think and respond; responses are validated for consistency.
- Human-in-the-loop: You review and approve each phase before it proceeds.
- Extensible compliance: Layer custom rules like security baselines or HIPAA/PCI-DSS/SOC2 compliance on top.
- Traceable artifacts: All artifacts land in an
aidlc-docs/directory in your project for traceability.
Quick Start
- Install this power in Kiro IDE or KIRO web via the Powers panel → Search AI-DLC Workflow V1 in the official available powers -> Try Power.
- It downloads the latest AI-DLC rules and adds them into the Kiro Steering files.
- Start any task with "Using AI-DLC, ..." — the AI-DLC steering rules will automatically guide the workflow.
Platform support: Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows wherever Kiro IDE runs.
Additional Resources
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