Hey team!
It’s a new release for all you Vega devs, SDK 0.23 is here! It comes with expanded Builder Tools MCP support, new performance tooling, and crash source attribution to help debugging.
On the events side, Cannes has kicked off and I’m jealous of any of you there right now! Dev Advocates Kourtney Meiss and Gio Laquidara are all over America, as they bring workshops and talks to San Francisco, New York, Orlando, and Portland.
If you missed Senior Devices VP Panos’s fireside chat last week, we have the recording for you.
And Kiro had a big week, landing a native iOS app and scheduled automations on the web.
Let’s get into it!
Dev Updates
Vega SDK 0.23 is out — see the release notes and the forum announcement; the Builder Tools MCP server picks up SDK-installation workflows, code-review tracking, and Node.js v24 compatibility, alongside new UI Fluidity prompts and performance tooling.
Amazon Appstore ends support for the Adobe AIR, Cordova, and Xamarin IAP plugins — If your app uses any of these In-App Purchasing plugins, the Appstore no longer maintains or supports them, so plan a migration off them.
Announcements
Introducing Kiro for iOS
- Kiro is now a native iOS app, giving you a new surface to kick off, monitor, steer, and interact with engineering work from your phone.
Introducing automations in Kiro on the web
- Kiro Web can now run work on a schedule, so recurring jobs like dependency bumps, doc updates, and contract checks don’t keep falling behind between merges.
Events
Cannes Lions runs through midweek as our biggest Fire TV moment of the summer, and the calendar stays full into July with AI Engineer World’s Fair, droidcon USA, and DevRelCon NYC, where our team is speaking and leading workshops.
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 22–26 | Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity | Cannes, FR | We’re sponsoring this one as a major Fire TV moment at the Palais des Festivals. |
| June 23 | React Universe Summit | New York City, US | A new summit format for the React ecosystem and the platforms, Vega included, that build on it. |
| June 25–27 | Vidcon Anaheim | Anaheim, US | The annual gathering for online video creators, platforms, and the creator economy. |
| June 29–July 2 | AI Engineer World’s Fair | San Francisco, US | The flagship AI Engineer conference on applied LLMs, agents, and the production AI stack, where our Senior Developer Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is leading a workshop with Amazon AGI Labs and the Bee team. |
| July 16–17 | droidcon USA | Orlando, US | The US edition of the global Android developer conference, where our Senior Developer Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is speaking. |
| July 22 | DevRelCon NYC | New York City, US | A developer-relations conference for the people who build and run developer communities, where our Developer Advocate Kourtney Meiss is speaking. |
| July 30–31 | Chain React | Portland, US | Developer Advocates Giovanni Laquidara and Kourtney Meiss are leading a workshop on building an agent harness for your React Native app. |
| Aug 1–31 | Gamescom | Cologne, DE | Europe’s largest games event, where we’ll be on the ground for gaming and partnerships. |
| Aug 4 | Ai4 | Las Vegas, US | One of the larger applied-AI industry conferences, with 8,000+ attendees across enterprise AI tracks. |
Dev Posts
Steering Claude Code: CLAUDE.md files, skills, hooks, rules, subagents and more is the practical read this week, a clear breakdown of seven customization surfaces and when each one actually loads. If you’d rather go closer to the metal, Amazon AGI Labs open-sourced its perception agent harness, and the annotation-plus-verification framing is a genuinely different approach to agents working against visual interfaces.
Introducing the perception agent harness, with annotation and verification
Amazon AGI Labs open-sourced a framework for agents that see and interpret visual interfaces the way a person does, built on two primitives: annotation, where you mark up elements visually instead of describing changes in text, and verification, where the agent checks rendered output against intent with DOM-level and end-to-end behavioral tests. It’s aimed squarely at the gap between generating UI code and confirming it actually works, shipping with a Nova Act Annotator Chrome extension and a Nova Act Visual Verifier skill. Worth a read if you’re building agentic web tooling and tired of the generate-then-eyeball loop.
Steering Claude Code: CLAUDE.md files, skills, hooks, rules, subagents and more
By Michael Segner
A clear breakdown of the seven ways to customize Claude Code — CLAUDE.md files, rules, skills, subagents, hooks, output styles, and system-prompt appends — and how each differs in when it loads, whether it survives compaction, its context cost, and its authority. The practical guidance is the useful part: push “never do this” guardrails into hooks or permissions, keep procedures in skills instead of bloating CLAUDE.md, and let path-scoped rules load only when the relevant files are touched. Recommended if you’re past the basics and want your setup to scale without drowning every session in context.
Bringing AI Beyond the Screen: Making Intelligence Disappear Into Daily Life
Panos Panay, SVP of Amazon Devices & Services, sits down for a VivaTech fireside chat on taking AI beyond the search box and into the real world: Alexa+ holding natural conversations across hundreds of millions of homes, Ring cameras proactively surfacing what matters, and Leo satellites extending connectivity where screens never reached. He digs into the momentum behind Alexa+ and the architecture and design decisions that move AI from understanding to doing, then looks ahead to whether the next wave of interaction arrives through voice, wearables, screens, or form factors we haven’t imagined yet.
AWS Summit New York City 2026 - Keynote
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of Agentic AI, gives the AWS Summit NYC keynote on the constraints that slow agents down and the platform pieces AWS is shipping to remove them.
Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week’s post? Let me know!