EARS: The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax

Kiro, the latest agentic IDE hotness, indicates that it you should "Define user stories and acceptance criteria in structured EARS notation". But didn't link to what EARS actually is [1]. Any mention of EARS also appeared to be missing from the HN post discussing Kiro [2]. If you have previous experience with EARS, it looks like you might be soon "hearing" all about it...

From the link...

The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) is a mechanism to gently constrain textual requirements. The EARS patterns provide structured guidance that enable authors to write high quality textual requirements.

Structured English that should be simpler for an LLM to parse and reason about.

[1]: https://kiro.dev/docs/specs/concepts/#workflow

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44560662