How I Stopped Being the Middleman Between Kiro and GitHub Actions
Here’s what my Tuesday mornings used to look like:
- GitHub Actions fails on a client’s Hugo deployment
- I open the failed run, scroll through the logs, copy the relevant error
- Switch to Kiro, paste the error, ask it to fix the issue
- Wait for the fix, review it, commit, push
- Watch the pipeline. If it fails again, go back to step 2
- Repeat across three or four other client repos that also broke overnight
That’s not development. That’s being a human clipboard between two tools that should already be talking to each other.
The Realisation
I hit my limit one Wednesday when I had four repos with failing CI simultaneously. A Hugo template syntax error in one, a broken PostCSS config in another, a Terraform validation failure in a third. Each one needed the same mechanical loop: copy logs, paste into Kiro, get fix, commit, push, wait, check.
I was spending 2-3 hours a week on this. Not thinking. Not designing. Not building features. Just… shuttling text between browser tabs.
The moment it clicked was embarrassingly simple. I was mid-paste into Kiro and thought: “I’m literally acting as middleware. I’m a REST endpoint that takes CI logs as input and commits fixes as output.”
If that’s all I’m doing, a GitHub Action can do it.
The Solution: kiro-action
Kiro has a CLI and it has an API key. GitHub Actions can run arbitrary commands. The pieces were already there — I just needed to wire them together.
Here’s the workflow I landed on:
name: Kiro Auto-Fix on CI Failure
on:
workflow_run:
workflows: ["Deploy Hugo Site"]
types:
- completed
jobs:
autofix:
# Only run when the triggering workflow failed, on main branch, and not already an autofix commit
if: >
github.event.workflow_run.conclusion == 'failure' &&
github.event.workflow_run.head_branch == 'main' &&
!contains(github.event.workflow_run.head_commit.message, '[kiro-autofix]')
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
permissions:
contents: write
actions: write
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
ref: main
fetch-depth: 2
token: ${{ secrets.KIRO_GITHUB_PAT }}
- name: Download failure logs
uses: actions/github-script@v7
with:
script: |
const fs = require('fs');
const runId = context.payload.workflow_run.id;
// Get failed jobs
const jobs = await github.rest.actions.listJobsForWorkflowRun({
owner: context.repo.owner,
repo: context.repo.repo,
run_id: runId,
filter: 'latest'
});
let failureLogs = '';
for (const job of jobs.data.jobs) {
if (job.conclusion === 'failure') {
// Download logs for the failed job
const logs = await github.rest.actions.downloadJobLogsForWorkflowRun({
owner: context.repo.owner,
repo: context.repo.repo,
job_id: job.id
});
failureLogs += `\n=== Job: ${job.name} ===\n${logs.data}\n`;
}
}
// Write logs to file (truncate to last 5000 chars to stay within prompt limits)
const truncated = failureLogs.length > 5000
? failureLogs.slice(-5000)
: failureLogs;
fs.writeFileSync('ci-failure.log', truncated);
console.log(`Captured ${failureLogs.length} chars of failure logs`);
- name: Install Kiro CLI
run: curl -fsSL https://cli.kiro.dev/install | bash
- name: Set up Node.js
uses: actions/setup-node@v4
with:
node-version: '20'
cache: 'npm'
- name: Install project dependencies
run: npm ci
- name: Run Kiro to fix the failure
env:
KIRO_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.KIRO_API_KEY }}
run: |
cat ci-failure.log | kiro-cli chat --no-interactive --trust-all-tools \
"The CI pipeline for this project just failed. Here are the failure logs. \
Please analyze the error, identify the root cause, and fix the code. \
Do NOT add new features — only fix what is broken. \
After fixing, verify the fix compiles/builds correctly."
- name: Check for changes
id: changes
run: |
if git diff --quiet; then
echo "has_changes=false" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
else
echo "has_changes=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
fi
- name: Commit and push fix
if: steps.changes.outputs.has_changes == 'true'
run: |
git config user.name "kiro-autofix[bot]"
git config user.email "kiro-autofix[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
git add -A
git commit -m "fix: auto-resolve CI failure [kiro-autofix]"
git push origin main
# Pushing to main will automatically re-trigger the Deploy Hugo Site workflow
The logic is straightforward:
- The deploy workflow fails
- This workflow triggers, downloads the failure logs
- Kiro CLI gets the logs piped in with instructions to fix only what’s broken
- If Kiro makes changes, they get committed and pushed
- The deploy workflow re-triggers automatically
- The
[kiro-autofix]tag in the commit message prevents infinite loops
The Gotchas That Actually Blocked Me
The YAML above looks clean. Getting there wasn’t. Here are the things that cost me time so they don’t have to cost you time.
1. API Keys Aren’t Enabled by Default
This is the one that’ll get most people. You can’t just generate a Kiro API key out of the box. You need to explicitly enable the feature first.
Go to https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/developer/home?region=us-east-1#/settings and turn on “Enable users to generate and use API keys”.
This isn’t in the Kiro docs where you’d expect it. It’s buried in the Amazon Q Developer settings in the AWS console. If you skip this step, you’ll get auth errors that don’t clearly tell you why.
2. Enable Kiro Web Agent While You’re There
On that same settings page, also enable Kiro Web Agent (Preview). You’re already in the console, you may as well flip both switches at once. I didn’t do this on my first pass and had to go back, which is the kind of minor annoyance that adds up when you’re configuring this across multiple AWS accounts for different clients.
3. The Region Mismatch: ap-southeast-2 vs us-east-1
This one’s subtle and specific to anyone running AWS in Australia (or any non-US region).
Your IAM Identity Center instance is probably in ap-southeast-2 because that’s where you set up your AWS organisation. Makes sense. But Kiro is registered in us-east-1. When you sign into app.kiro.dev, you need to use us-east-1 as the region — not the region where your Identity Center lives.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time getting “identity provider not found” errors before I worked this out. The mental model is: your Identity Center can live wherever it lives, but Kiro’s application registration is in us-east-1, and that’s the region you specify at login time.
What My Week Looks Like Now
The difference is night and day.
Locally: I use Kiro for feature work, design, writing new infrastructure. The stuff that actually needs my brain — architecture decisions, client conversations, code review.
In CI: When something breaks (and things always break — a dependency updates, a template syntax changes, a build flag gets deprecated), the autofix workflow handles it. Kiro gets the logs, makes the fix, pushes it, and the pipeline re-runs.
My role: I review green PRs. I check the autofix commits to make sure they’re sensible. Occasionally Kiro can’t fix something automatically and I step in. But that’s the exception now, not the default.
Across four active client repos, I’ve gone from 2-3 hours a week of copy-paste busywork to maybe 15 minutes of reviewing autofix commits. That’s actual development time reclaimed.
What I’m Automating Next
This was the gateway drug. Once you see the loop close itself for the first time, you immediately start thinking about what else is just human middleware.
Steering files for consistency across repos. I want Kiro to automatically pull in project-specific steering (coding standards, architecture decisions, dependency preferences) so the autofix commits match the style of each client’s codebase without me manually configuring each one.
Scheduled maintenance tasks. Dependency updates, security patches, routine infrastructure rotations. Things that should just happen on a schedule and land as PRs for review.
Automated PR review. When a team member opens a PR, Kiro reviews it against the project’s steering files and leaves comments before I even look at it. Not replacing human review — augmenting it.
The pattern is the same every time: identify where I’m acting as middleware between two systems, then remove myself from the loop.
The Honest Take
This isn’t magic. Kiro doesn’t fix everything perfectly every time. Sometimes the autofix commit is wrong and I revert it. Sometimes the error is too complex and requires human understanding of the business logic.
But the 80% of CI failures that are straightforward — a typo, a missing import, a config value that changed, a deprecated API — those get handled automatically now. And that 80% was eating most of my time because it was spread across multiple repos and interrupted whatever else I was doing.
The best part: it compresses the feedback loop from “I’ll get to it when I context-switch back to that repo” to “fixed in the next 3 minutes after failure.” Clients see faster resolution times, I don’t lose flow state, everyone wins.
If you’re juggling multiple repos and spending too much time shuttling errors between your CI system and your AI coding assistant, we can help you set this up. It’s the kind of automation that pays for itself in the first week.
Get in touch with Altitude Code — we’ll get your CI fix loop closed and your time back where it belongs.
