Super interesting that no one here has mentioned replit.

I found the experience of using Kiro and replit really similar with one important difference: replit mostly worked.

Kiro tore off and wrote tonnes of code and tests. It asked me to peck at approval requests (one thing I liked was the regexp type trust this tool to do this requests) it spent half a day creating an app to do what I asked... and it was incomprehensible bullshit. I couldn't do anything with the project and I have not touched it since.

Replit was a bit more interactive, but pretty autonomous, and it got me to 90% of the solution and then stalled out - wouldn't correct some of the problems I identified to it. About 2 hrs with Cursor sorted that out though.

I did use Cursor to do it "AI assisted" and that took about the same amount of time. The advantage is that I really do know whats going on in the code base, but the Replit + Cursor solution is actually better in the sense that it looks better, and works better because the agent did some bits a bit more nicely than I did with Cursor - so I got those ideas for free.

Anyway :

Hand coding = a walk through the wilderness

Cursor = motor cross scrambler bike up the mountain

Replit = a helicopter ride to somewhere higher up the mountain selected at random that you didn't know about but now you have to get to the peak by yourself buddy, good luck

Kiro = you are blindfolded in a container of some sort and it's moving.

relevant: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119 - July, 2025 (53 comments)