Table of Contents

Use Spec Kitty in Amazon Q CLI

Tier: supported. Retained as legacy alongside the Kiro rebrand per CLAUDE.md. Citation (accessed 2026-05-21): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/

Prerequisites

  • Spec Kitty CLI installed. See Install Spec Kitty.
  • Project initialized for this harness: 
    spec-kitty init --ai q
    (The configuration key is q; the on-disk directory is .amazonq/.)
  • Amazon Q Developer CLI installed and signed in. Follow the Amazon Q Developer User Guide for installation and authentication.

Where Spec Kitty installs files

Per the supported-harnesses matrix, Amazon Q CLI uses the prompt-file mechanism. Spec Kitty installs:

  • Directory: .amazonq/prompts/
  • Files: spec-kitty.specify.md, spec-kitty.plan.md, spec-kitty.tasks.md, spec-kitty.implement.md, spec-kitty.review.md, spec-kitty.accept.md, spec-kitty.merge.md, spec-kitty.dashboard.md, spec-kitty.status.md, spec-kitty.charter.md, spec-kitty.analyze.md, spec-kitty.research.md.

Canonical invocation

Inside Amazon Q CLI, the prompt files are surfaced as slash commands:

/spec-kitty.specify "<one-line mission description>"
/spec-kitty.plan
/spec-kitty.tasks
/spec-kitty.implement WP01

If your installed Amazon Q version uses a different prompt-invocation convention, consult the host docs at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/ for the current syntax.

Worked example

  1. From your project root, launch Amazon Q CLI (q chat).
  2. At the prompt, type: 
    /spec-kitty.specify "a hello world page"
  3. Spec Kitty's interview prompts appear — answer them inline.
  4. When asked for a kebab-case slug, supply something short, e.g. hello-world-page.
  5. The mission spec lands at kitty-specs/hello-world-page-<mid8>/spec.md.

Troubleshooting

  • /spec-kitty.* prompts do not appear. Run spec-kitty agent config sync from the repo root. This rewrites .amazonq/prompts/ from the canonical source templates. Restart Amazon Q CLI.

  • Profile not loading. Run inside Amazon Q:

    /ad-hoc-profile-load researcher-robbie

    Use the profile id from the work-package frontmatter.

Where to learn more about Amazon Q

Authoritative documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/ (accessed 2026-05-21).

Edit this page