Hey there, dev team!
I’m off to Athens for CityJS Athens tomorrow, so this week’s post is a little early.
Bee has two new devices: Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse, a wearable you can clip on or wear on your wrist and a slim magnetic phone attachment, and Bee now connects to Alexa+. Bee also has a new help center covering setup, privacy controls, and the new Bee Pro subscription.
For Fire TV reporting, the Stability dashboard has an updated UI, the Stability API is now generally available, and the Performance and Monetization Metrics APIs are in public beta.
On the AWS side, Lambda Web Functions run the Express or Next.js server you already have on Lambda as-is, Amazon S3 is on the Vercel Marketplace, and there’s a beginner’s guide to event-driven architecture built around a single food delivery order. Kiro also added the Kimi K3 model and enterprise sign-in controls.
We have new Amazon Developer tutorials too: Kourtney compares testing on the Vega Virtual Device and a Fire TV Stick, I walk through getting started with Vega, and Gio made this cute little video that turns Amazon Devices Builder Tools into a two-minute retro quest:
The Build, Ship, Shape hackathon closes this Friday, October 23, so get your project submitted. As I mentioned, I’ll be in Athens for CityJS Athens this week, and Gio is speaking at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose.
Come say hi if you’ll be in Athens or San Jose!
Ring Appstore API: location-based integration subscriptions — The API now includes location-based integration subscriptions alongside device-based ones, so check that your plan-coverage logic handles both.
Just Walk Out for physical stores: who handles receipts, lookups, and refunds — A new Post Purchase page, also noted in the document history, covers each Retail Integration model.
App Stability dashboard: updated UI — The Stability dashboard in App Health Insights has an updated UI.
Alexa+ Smart Home Glossary — A new glossary defines the terms used across the Alexa+ smart home docs, whether you connect with ACK, Matter, or an add-on.
bee-cli v0.8.0 — Adds threads commands and MCP tools, puts threads in the data API, and supports repeatable flags in resource commands.
Bee help center — Bee’s new help center covers setup, privacy controls, and the Bee Pro subscription, and has a page for Frontier and Eclipse customers.
Kimi K3 model is now available in Kiro — Moonshot AI’s open-weight Kimi K3 is now selectable in Kiro, with a context window big enough to hold a whole codebase.
Kiro: enterprise sign-in controls — Administrators can now choose which sign-in methods users see on managed devices, for example requiring IAM Identity Center.
Amazon S3 on the Vercel Marketplace and v0 — Add S3 object storage, S3 Tables, or S3 Vectors to a Vercel or v0 project straight from the Vercel Marketplace.
React Native 0.88 — Adds web-style event capturing and bubbling, variable fonts, and iOS SceneDelegate support, with no user-facing breaking changes.
Expo SDK 58 — Ships React Native 0.88 and iOS 27 support; check the upgrade notes for breaking changes before you bump.
Appstore Reporting: Monetization Metrics API and Vitals Performance API Enter Public Beta
- You can now pull crash, performance and subscription health data straight into your own alerts and release gates, alongside the App Stability dashboard’s new UI, with the Stability API now generally available and both the Performance API extending Vitals API V2 and the new Monetization Metrics API for subscription lifecycle and fulfillment status entering public beta.
Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse: Introducing new AI wearable and phone attachment
- Building ambient or voice-first experiences? Our newly announced Bee Frontier (a wearable for the wrist or a clip) and Bee Eclipse (a slim magnetic phone attachment) are a useful reference for pairing always-available capture with privacy the user can see and control, and Bee now connects to Alexa+ so what it captures can come back as a hands-free answer; the new Bee help center covers setup and the new devices.
Announcing AWS Lambda Web Functions
- Lambda Web Functions run the HTTP framework you already use, so an Express or Next.js app or API moves onto Lambda without a rewrite, with each instance serving many requests and global distribution built in, and builder walkthroughs show it with Bedrock AgentCore and for an Express app.
Claude Code Review is now generally available
- Claude Code’s automated pull request reviewer is out of research preview and generally available for Team and Enterprise organizations, with a review depth admins can set for each repository, and the Claude Code team explains how they review code agents write.
HERE Location Reasoning (HLR) expands map data access to AWS
- If your agents need location answers drawn from real map data rather than guesswork, HERE Location Reasoning is now generally available as a pay-as-you-go MCP server on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore through AWS Marketplace and as a Kiro Power, so you can add deterministic geospatial reasoning to logistics, field service, or in-car assistants without building your own spatial stack.
Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online, so jump in and start building before the deadline. In person, I’m giving a talk at CityJS Athens, my colleague Gio is giving a talk on Oct 22 at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America called “Hand the Agent the Clicker,” on Porthole, which streams Android and Android TV emulators to a browser and hands the same controls to an AI agent over MCP, and we’ll close out the season at AWS re:Invent 2026, so we hope to see you there!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31 – Oct 23 | Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon | Online | Our first global developer hackathon: build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee across four tracks for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23. |
| Oct 21–23 | CityJS Athens | Athens, GR | Athens edition of the CityJS conference series, covering modern JavaScript and frontend frameworks. Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk. |
| Oct 21–22 | NAB Show New York | New York City, US | East-coast edition of NAB Show, the broadcast, media, and entertainment-tech industry conference, at the Javits Center. |
| Oct 22–23 | AGNTCon + MCPCon North America | San Jose, US | Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks for builders, contributors, and enterprises. Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is giving a talk on Oct 22, “Hand the Agent the Clicker,” on Porthole, a CLI and MCP server that streams Android and Android TV emulators to a browser for a human and exposes the same controls to an AI agent over MCP. |
| Oct 23–26 | React Advanced London | London, GB | Annual advanced-React conference in London for senior practitioners working with the framework at scale. |
| Oct 28–29 | GitHub Universe | San Francisco, US | GitHub’s flagship two-day event for developers, maintainers, and technical leaders, focused on collaboration and workflows in the agentic era. |
| Oct 29–31 | React India | Goa, IN | India’s largest React conference, covering web, mobile, and emerging React platforms. |
| Nov 9–12 | Web Summit | Lisbon, PT | One of Europe’s largest tech conferences, with broad coverage across AI, devices, startups, and platforms. |
| Nov 10–12 | AI Engineer Code Summit | San Francisco, US | The code-focused summit in the AI Engineer conference series, on agent and LLM development. |
| Nov 30 – Dec 4 | AWS re:Invent 2026 | Las Vegas, US | AWS’s flagship annual conference, with 1,000+ technical sessions, keynotes, workshops, and the largest cloud-community gathering of the year. |
It’s a hands-on week: Kourtney finally settles the Virtual Device or Fire TV Stick question for Vega testing, Panos Panay explains why the new Alexa Tablet went all in on Android, and the Claude Code team shares how they keep up with reviewing code their agents write. If you’re shipping a web backend, the Lambda Web Functions walkthroughs is worth your coffee break.
How to Test Your Vega OS App: Vega Virtual Device vs. Fire TV Stick
Developer Advocate Kourtney Meiss settles a question every Vega developer runs into early: test on the Vega Virtual Device or on a real Fire TV Stick? Her answer is both, at different stages. She demos each target with the Vega CLI, Vega Studio in VS Code, and an AI coding agent, explains what the virtual device can’t simulate, and shows when to move to hardware. If you’re setting up your first Vega test loop, this video tells you where each tool fits.
Event-driven architecture on AWS: a beginner’s guide
If your backend still chains direct calls from one user action to four services, this guide follows a single food delivery order to show how EventBridge, SNS, SQS, and Lambda split up the work. It wraps with a small app you build alongside your coding agent and Agent Toolkit for AWS.
Getting Started with Vega
New to Vega? This is my walkthrough, where I take you from a fresh install of the Vega Developer Tools to a running Hello World app, building the same app three ways: with an AI coding assistant, from the command line, and in VS Code. That makes it easy to pick the workflow that fits how you already work before you start a real Vega project.
Lambda Web Functions + Bedrock AgentCore
With this week’s Lambda Web Functions announcement, you can run the web server you already have on Lambda as-is, and two builder pieces show it in practice. Meena Thandavarayan’s Lambda Web Functions + Bedrock AgentCore puts a browser chat UI on one and streams an agent’s replies back as they’re generated. Vishal Alhat’s Because Your Express App Deserves Better Than a Lambda Adapter breaks down how it changes the economics for I/O-heavy APIs and builds a small API to prove it.
I Asked Panos Panay Why You’d Spend $499 on an Amazon Tablet
Andru Edwards sits down with Panos Panay, SVP of Devices & Services, to dig into the thinking behind the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro: the move to Android, Alexa at the center of the experience, and a direction he says was two and a half years in the making. It’s a rare look at how the hardware choices, from the screen shape to the keyboard, are meant to change how people use a tablet, which is useful context for anyone planning how their app should look on our new devices.
Retro tech meets modern AI: Inside an Amazon developer’s garage turned working computer museum
GeekWire visits the Maple Valley, Wash. garage of Darko Mesaroš, a Distinguished Developer Advocate at AWS, where decades of vintage machines are repaired, kept running, and wired up to talk to today’s coding agents. It’s a fun weekend read and a good reminder of how much today’s tools rest on the hardware that came before them. If you’ve ever wondered what an AI agent makes of a terminal older than you are, start here.
Jamie Siminoff: My way of winning is building a lock no one else has.
Ring founder and chief inventor Jamie Siminoff sits down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to tell the story behind Ring’s first smart lock, built around a hand-crank dial that does away with the dead-battery problem. He also shares how he prototyped it himself overnight with AI, gives an update on Search Party, and explains why he came back to Amazon. Hear him lay out his four principles for moving fast and his case for staying focused on customers instead of competitors, a useful perspective for anyone building hardware or shipping products quickly.
Leadership in Focus: Miguel Sainz
The Zoox Leadership in Focus series profiles Miguel Sainz, Vice President, Software Systems, who leads the software behind the Zoox robotaxi. It’s a short read on how one engineering leader approaches building software for a vehicle that drives itself, and it’s useful to anyone whose code has to be right the first time.
Working With Kiro workflows
On the Kiro channel, Developer Experience Engineer Catherine Cao demos the quickest path into Kiro workflows, going from a plain description of the job you want done to a multi-step workflow you can run and save for reuse. It’s a short, practical starting point if you keep re-prompting an agent for the same multi-step task and want to make it repeatable.
New ways to drive smarter discovery, deeper engagement, and business growth on Google Play
By Paul Feng
Paul Feng, who leads Google Play Engineering, Product, and UX, lays out Play’s latest round of discovery, engagement, and quality-program updates, with a checklist for getting your listing in front of users in AI-driven surfaces. Our new Alexa Tablets run Android with Google Play, so this is a good read on how your app gets found on them, and which polish work Play rewards with lower service fees.
How the Claude Code team does code review
By Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang
The Claude Code team at Anthropic explains how they review code now that agents write most of it. They treat human attention as the scarce resource and let automated review run continuously while a change is being written. The piece digs into where humans stay in the loop, how the team checks that saved review time isn’t just showing up later as reverts and incidents, and how they keep shared context when fewer people read every line. If your team is shipping more agent-written changes than its reviewers can keep up with, the section on adopting the process is a practical place to start. It’s a useful companion to this week’s Code Review general availability.
Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week’s post? Let me know!