McGarrah Technical Blog

Posts in category "devtools"

Kiro IDE on Windows: WSL2 Support via Open Remote Extension

Kiro doesn't ship with Microsoft's WSL extension, and the official extension isn't available on Open VSX. The Open Remote - WSL extension by jeanp413 bridges the gap — but it requires an easy-to-miss argv.json configuration step, breaks predictably on Kiro updates, and has terminal routing quirks that will cost you an hour if you don't know about them. Here's the complete setup, the failure modes, and the recovery procedures.

Kiro IDE: Running Parallel Personas for Director and Developer Workflows

Kiro's ~/.kiro directory stores powers, hooks, agents, and MCP server configs globally — but there's no built-in way to switch between profiles. If you need a Senior Director persona loaded with Atlassian, GitLab, and observability MCPs running alongside a stripped-down developer persona focused on code, you have to get creative. Here's how the path resolution actually works and three approaches to running both simultaneously on macOS and Windows.