KiroCrew's telling design choice is to present a development workspace as software you install and keep running on your own hardware. It treats the workspace as a service you install and keep running on your own hardware, and its README opens with pages of operations detail to match. If you want to judge whether the project fits your setup, that plumbing is the part to read closely.
The pitch itself is short. Kiro Crew is an open source development workspace that runs locally or on a remote host you control. Multi-step tasks can run unattended, recurring jobs run on a schedule you set, and heartbeats monitor systems until something needs attention. The banner describes software that runs on your hardware, remembers across sessions, and keeps working unattended. The project also calls the workspace self-learning and self-evolving, but the introduction does not explain how that works. The README's table of contents links a separate "How it works" section for readers who want the mechanism.
A workspace with several front doors
The same work is reachable from a desktop app, a web dashboard, and a CLI. The web dashboard works without any messaging credentials. When you step away from it, you can continue with the same agent through a messaging channel: Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, Webex, WeCom, WeChat, WhatsApp, Feishu, or iMessage. The README notes that Teams needs a public HTTPS webhook.
That list fits the README's description of a persistent workspace that remembers across sessions. The desktop app, for one, talks to a Gateway. It starts a bundled Gateway when no local one is already running, and it can connect to a remote Gateway over an SSH tunnel. Underneath every install path sits kiro-cli, which the first launch installs if needed before guiding you through Kiro device-code sign-in.
On top of that, Kiro Crew Apps package the workspace for a specific job. According to the README, an App combines a purpose-built interface with agents, skills, schedules, integrations, and backend services.
Install choices for local and long-running hosts
You can run the desktop app, a one-line install on your machine or a remote host, a Docker image meant for always-on servers, or a build from source. On Linux the README recommends starting with the one-line install, because it puts kirocrew on your PATH. That makes kirocrew service install reachable, along with the AppArmor profile the agent sandbox needs on Ubuntu 23.10 and later. The .deb and .rpm desktop packages install to a fixed path under /opt, which lets them set that profile up for you. The AppImage skips root but needs FUSE and carries a manual sandbox step.
The installer also avoids your system Python by default. It fetches a SHA-256-pinned copy of uv and provisions a self-contained CPython 3.12 into ~/.kiro/crew-python, so the install does not depend on, or break with, the system interpreter. You can opt out with the installer's system-python flag, and that choice is recorded next to the release channel so later re-runs of the installer keep it. If the managed interpreter cannot be downloaded, the installer falls back to a system Python 3.12 or newer for that run. Air-gapped hosts can point at mirrors through KIROCREW_UV_URL and UV_PYTHON_INSTALL_MIRROR.
Supply-chain details get similar care. The wheel is SHA-256 verified, and x86_64 and aarch64 each get their own build, auto-update feed, and SLSA provenance attestation. The Docker image publishes linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 under every tag, so a pull picks the right one.
Release channels and a shared data home
Every install path offers Stable, Insider, and Nightly. Stable is the default, built from Insider builds that baked long enough to be promoted. Insider ships from release-candidate tags for people who want features days to weeks early. Nightly builds untested main HEAD at 06:00 UTC daily, and the README tells you to expect breakage.
The fine print matters for anyone running more than one copy. Stable and Insider are two update lanes of the same app, so installing both side by side does not give you independent installs. They read one desktop settings store and share one update download cache, and whichever copy last wrote the channel wins. Switch one to Insider and the other follows. Setting KIROCREW_HOME does not separate them either, since it moves the data home and not the desktop settings.
Nightly is a separate app with its own name, icon, channel, and settings store, so it installs alongside Stable or Insider instead of replacing it. The README is explicit that this does not make it a sandbox: Nightly reads the same ~/.kiro/crew data home unless you point it elsewhere with KIROCREW_HOME.
GitHub: https://github.com/kirodotdev/KiroCrew
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