Chat

The Kiro CLI provides an interactive chat mode that lets you have natural conversations with AI directly in your terminal. This feature brings the power of conversational AI to your command-line workflow.

Starting a session

To start a chat session

kiro-cli

Or start a chat with a specific context:

kiro-cli --agent myagent

Entering multi-line statements

To enter multi-line statements, use the /editor command or type Ctrl(^) + J to insert new-line for multi-line prompt

/editor

This opens your default editor (defaults to vi) where you can compose longer, multi-line prompts. After you save and close the editor, the content will be sent as your message to Kiro.

You can also:

• Use the /reply command to open your editor with the most recent assistant message quoted for reply, which is useful for multi-line responses to previous messages.

Conversation persistence

Kiro can remember your conversations based on the folder where you started them. When you start a session where you previously chatted with Kiro, you can tell Kiro to automatically load that conversation history, allowing you to seamlessly continue your discussion.

Directory-based persistence

If it's your first time chatting in that directory, Kiro will start a new conversation (taking into consideration any designated context).

To explicitly resume a conversation in the current directory, use:

$ kiro-cli chat --resume

To open an interactive session picker to choose from previous sessions:

$ kiro-cli chat --resume-picker

Manually saving and loading conversations

You can also manually save and load conversations using the following commands while in a chat session:

    /chat save [path] – Saves your current conversation to a JSON file.

        Add -f or --force to overwrite an existing file

        Examples:

        /chat save ./my-project-conversation -f

        /chat save /home/user/project/my-project-conversation.json

        You cannot use ~ to denote your home directory.

    /chat load [path] – Loads a conversation from a previously saved JSON file

        Example: /chat load ./my-project-conversation.json