Kilo Speed - you might have heard us mention it a few times. It's not a motto or marketing slogan; it's our opinionated view on how high performing teams work. It's the philosophy that has powered our growth from an idea in March 2025 to the most popular open source coding platform, processing six trillion tokens a month.

Kilo Speed (n) kēlō spēd: A state of effortless, joyful flow achieved when you can focus without dependencies, blockers, or friction of any kind.

Example: Every light was green on my commute this morning and I made it to work in record time -- I was moving at Kilo Speed.

We achieve Kilo Speed through a combination of a strong, opinionated culture and flexible all-in-one Kilo platform. Today I'm going to unpack how we do it.

The Transformation

At Kilo we ship faster than any team I've ever worked with, delivering 1-2 major features a week, as opposed to a feature every 2-3 weeks as I've seen in the past. And the one change is this: We stopped working like it's 2023 and started working like it's 2028. 

The old software development paradigm is dying:

• Developer productivity = lines of code 

• Collaboration as the default (meetings, handoffs, "alignment" forever)

• Velocity killers everywhere: waiting on PRs, waiting on other teams, constant context switching

In its place, a new paradigm is emerging:

• Developers define the vision and manage AI agents to execute

• They own products end-to-end, collaborating with others is optional and at the discretion of the owner

• They are never stuck waiting on a PR review or another team to unblock them

Most teams are still operating like it's 2023. At Kilo, we're deliberately pushing into how we believe the best teams will work two years from now and driving that future forward. By operating this way, we've unlocked a new level of developer productivity.

Shipping at Kilo Speed

At Kilo, each engineer owns a feature end-to-end. There's no extended PRD review phase or waiting for signoff before getting to work. Engineers use our Architect Agent to design the feature, Orchestrator Agent to break up the task, Code Agent to build, and Debug Agent to troubleshoot, before sending the PR to our AI Code Reviewer. Once the engineer, agents, and automated tests are satisfied, the feature is deployed. The engineer continues to own the feature post deployment, iterating based on real world user feedback.

This isn't theoretical, it's how we operate every day. For example, my colleague Evgeny recently shipped Kilo Deploy, one click deployment for Next.js applications and static sites. Back in October we posted a call for engineers on a Friday, Evgeny applied that weekend and was hired on Wednesday. He joined us in person in Amsterdam at our Focus Week and started working on Kilo the following Monday. His first code commit was Monday, his first demo was Tuesday, and he had a working MVP by the end of the week. Kilo Deploy went GA two weeks later.

Moving this fast is how we've delivered Kilo Sessions (Igor), Code Reviewer (Suresh), Cloud Agents (Florian) and Kilo Man (Brian T) all in the last month, while continuing to make major enhancements on our VS Code, Jetbrains, and CLI experience. Kilo Speed isn't limited to engineering. Kilo's marketing and devrel teams own our website, using Kilo to adjust copy and design as our product and marketing strategy evolve.

Culture meets product

The recipe for Kilo Speed is equal parts culture and technology. Eliminating both process friction is just as important as eliminating tool friction. Engineers ship faster when their processes and tools work with them, not against them, as they do with Kilo's end-to-end development workflows.

Kilo is built for Kilo Speed

Kilo is built from the ground up for Kilo Speed.

• Open by design so you can see what's happening, not just hope for the best.

• Built for agent orchestration with five built-in agent modes, parallel agents, and agent manager

• Access to 500+ models through Kilo and BYOK, so you can pick the right model for each task, not just the one your vendor prefers.

• Meet you where you're already working, whether it's VS Code, Jetbrains, the CLI, Cloud Agents on the web, or our mobile apps

• A seamless session experience, so you can kick off a project on your phone on the way to work and pick it up wherever you want when you're at the desk

And because we use Kilo to develop Kilo, we have a powerful product development flywheel. We feel the problems first. We fix the problems before anyone sees them. We ship faster. 

The proof is in production

Core to what makes our development experience different is that we're focused on shipping a fundamentally different product than most of the AI dev tools on the market. We're not just a coding agent, not just a code reviewer, not just an app builder. Part of what makes Kilo special is that Kilo is all of those things in one. 

No more switching between apps from PM to Eng to Release. 

No more context lost and starting over along the way. 

By consolidating our workflows into a single application, Kilo makes it easy to get started and more directly adopt the next level of AI--for an individual developer, for an engineering team, or for an entire development organization. 

When developers aren't caught up in the papercuts that come with tool switching, they can focus on truly impactful work. When developers adopt Kilo Speed, the impact shows up quickly--in cycle time, shipped features, and what actually hits production. And, in what matters most: value created for customers. 

Our results so far speak for themselves, in the last six weeks we've launched the following features: Kilo Autocomplete in VS Code and JetBrains, Parallel Agents, Kilo Sessions, Cloud Agents, Code Review, Managed Indexing, App Builder, Voice Prompting in VS Code, and Team AI Adoption Dashboard.

The proof is in production.

Bringing Kilo Speed to all

This next phase for Kilo is not just about shipping more features. It's about inviting you into a new way of working.

Getting started with Kilo Speed doesn't mean overhauling everything at once. Changes happen slowly and in small bites at first. You bring Kilo into the workflows you already have. It starts with tab autocomplete in the IDE you already use, then try the Kilo agent in the CLI, then parallel agents in agent manager. Then to the next developer on your team. Slow at first, and then all at once. Today, you can start by installing Kilo and shipping your next feature faster than you thought possible.

Today, we call it Kilo Speed because it's something special. But, if we do our job right, a year from now, we'll just call it software engineering.