I discovered by accident that I can use Kiro CLI in AWS CloudShell just by pressing "q"

2026.01.07

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 Discovered that Kiro CLI can be used without installationDuring other testing, I accidentally pressed q in CloudShell and Kiro CLI launched.

Since I hadn't used Kiro CLI before, I took this opportunity to try it out, and was able to easily log in with AWS Builder ID authentication via URL and have a conversation.








I'm not sure if it's related to the Free plan, but Claude was the only model available.

 Investigating the pathSince I couldn't find any official announcements even after searching, I decided to investigate myself.
Looking into what q actually is, it's an alias/symlink to kiro-cli, which appears to have been added around November 2025.
~ $ which q
alias q='kiro-cli'
        /usr/local/bin/kiro-cli

~ $ ls -la /usr/local/bin/q*
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 23 Nov 25 12:45 /usr/local/bin/q -> /usr/local/bin/kiro-cli
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 28 Nov 25 12:45 /usr/local/bin/qchat -> /usr/local/bin/kiro-cli-chat
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 28 Nov 25 12:45 /usr/local/bin/qterm -> /usr/local/bin/kiro-cli-term
I also checked the filesystem. CloudShell's persistent storage (1GB) is only for $HOME and is retained per region. Since /usr/local/bin/ is on the AWS-managed system storage (/ root), I confirmed that Kiro CLI comes pre-installed in the CloudShell environment.
~ $ df -h /usr/local/bin/ && echo "---" && df -h ~
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
overlay          16G  6.3G  8.6G  43% /
---
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0      974M  388K  906M   1% /home/cloudshell-user

~ $ lsblk -f | grep -E "loop0|overlay|nvme"
loop0                                  905.8M     0% /home/cloudshell-user
nvme0n1                                              
├─nvme0n1p1                             24.9G    17% /aws/mde/.mde_env_api_auth_token
├─nvme0n1p127                                        
└─nvme0n1p128                                        
nvme1n1                                  8.5G    40% /aws/mde/logs

~ $ echo $HOME
/home/cloudshell-user
 Final thoughtsIt was lucky that I found Kiro CLI available in CloudShell by chance. I think it will be useful for checking AWS resources and doing small tests or analyses, so please give it a try if you're interested.
That's all.