🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Sherifdeen Awofiranye, software engineer at TM30 and AWS Community Builder. Sherifdeen is a developer who builds practical, serverless solutions and explains them in really easy to understand ways. He’s also big into building with AI, and has done some fascinating work that he’s shared on his blog. Thank you for everything you do, and keep up the great work, Sherifdeen!

💯 Spotlight

We’ve officially reached a new era of AI-assisted coding. We were introduced to the concept with Cursor and CoPilot, but recently a newcomer has us picking our jaws up off the floor - Kiro. I’ll be honest, I’ve been using it somewhat superficially, strictly to vibe code like I did with Cursor. But after reading the article from Geethika Guruge, I’m ready to take it to the next level for a genuine AI programmer to do my work 😅 His article, My AI Pit Crew: Building a Production App in a Single Stop shows us exactly how to configure Kiro for spec-driven development and how the guardrails and requirements you provide keep it in line as it develops (and executes!) an entire dev plan. We’re living in the future!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Speaking of Kiro and all the things it can do, it does more that vibe code and spec-driven development! You can also configure it with MCP servers to enhance the quality of its output. Naoya Yamamoto recounts how he uses MCP servers with Kiro to automatically enhance his app and I find it so cool how we can inject an AI coder into a development team, not just as a pair programmer. I’m still in a trust but verify mentality with AI-generated code, but I’m loving the way things are trending.

To tamp back all of this Kiro excitement, Marty Henderson gave us his take on Kiro, vibe coding as a whole, and the future of software development. I appreciate his pragmatism and ability to not fall victim to the hype. He goes through some of the cool features of Kiro, but also grounds us with what they mean for developers. Bonus points for Marty - the whole article has Fleetwood Mac lyrics through it, making it as fun a read as it is informative.

And to ground us even more, we got a warning from Ami Luttwak, cofounder of Wiz, about the dangers of vibe coding and how security around it needs to adjust. To be fair, Ami doesn’t really talk about the dangers of vibe coding so much as he talks about how security has always been a second-class citizen, and vibe coding really leaning on the flippant nature of developers when it comes to the “boring security stuff.” This is a great Q&A session that tells us a bit about Wiz, but also how we should approach security when we’re asking AI to generate everything.

💡 Tip of the Week

Clearly AI is on everyone’s mind (myself included). Our social tip of the week is for hiring developers in the age of AI. What skills do you look for? How has the hiring process changed? What do we do with our hands? Interesting insight from Drew Beaupre on the topic.

🐣 New Releases

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless introduced automatic semantic enrichment, allowing you an easy way to search for things with similar meanings. As someone who has implemented this before, this is a huge win!

Automated Reasoning for Amazon Bedrock went generally available. This is your best bet to fight hallucinations. Gotta be honest, I’m intrigued by this one.

Last week OpenAI introduced two open source models - gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. On the same day, AWS announced support for them in Bedrock. That’s some serious velocity from the Bedrock team and extremely exciting to see OpenAI in there now!

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 just got 30% faster. No changes need on your part, just enjoy faster speeds 😎

AWS released a Lambda function GitHub action that deploys functions into AWS in your CI pipelines. There’s a lot of excitement on this, but I’m struggling to see why - this is what we’ve been doing with IaC for years. Either way, I’m glad people are happy about it.

Last Words

Serverless Days Bengaluru was last week and from what I gather on social media, it was a hit! Lots of wonderful speakers and sessions out there from all over the world. I hope to see those session recaps coming online in the next few weeks, it looked like there were some great talks!

That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?

What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen