performance: kiro-cli-term adds ~1.5s delay to shell startup

[AbdelrahmanHafez]

Checks

• I have searched github.com/aws/amazon-q-developer-cli/issues and there are no duplicates of my issue
• I have run q doctor in the affected terminal session
• I have run q restart and replicated the issue again

Operating system

macOS 26.2.0 (Apple M1 Pro)

Expected behaviour

Shell startup should be fast. Without kiro-cli, my fish shell starts in ~70ms.

Actual behaviour

With kiro-cli enabled, shell startup takes ~1.5-1.7 seconds. This happens on every new terminal window/tab or tmux window.

After extensive debugging, I narrowed down the issue to kiro-cli-term itself. When I set PROCESS_LAUNCHED_BY_Q=1 to prevent kiro-cli-term from launching, startup drops from 1.5s to 70ms. However, autocomplete stops working without kiro-cli-term.

Interestingly, the shell integration hooks themselves are fast:

• kiro-cli init fish pre: ~20ms
• kiro-cli init fish post: ~45ms
• fig_precmd (the prompt hook): ~23ms

So the ~1.4s delay is somewhere in kiro-cli-term's initialization, not in the fish shell hooks.

Steps to reproduce

1. Have kiro-cli installed with fish shell integrations
2. Open a new terminal window or tmux window
3. Observe ~1.5s delay before the prompt appears

To verify it's kiro-cli-term causing the delay:

1. Create a file ~/.config/fish/conf.d/00_0_skip_kiro.fish with content:

   set -gx PROCESS_LAUNCHED_BY_Q 1

2. Open a new terminal - startup is now ~70ms
3. But autocomplete no longer works

Environment

[q-details]
version = "1.24.0"
hash = "0728b2464fed0b53e63abbb9ce12fa38a0542d69"
date = "2026-01-15T23:42:41.840104Z (4d ago)"
variant = "full"

[system-info]
os = "macOS 26.2.0 (25C56)"
chip = "Apple M1 Pro"
total-cores = 10
memory = "16.00 GB"

[environment]
cwd = "/Users/USER/dev"
cli-path = "/Users/USER/dev"
os = "Mac"
shell-path = "/opt/homebrew/Cellar/fish/4.3.3/bin/fish"
shell-version = "4.3.3"
terminal = "Kitty"
install-method = "brew"

[env-vars]
SHELL = "/opt/homebrew/bin/fish"
TERM = "tmux-256color"
__CFBundleIdentifier = "net.kovidgoyal.kitty"