Hands-on project using Kiro Spec-driven development

AWS Kiro is an AI IDE that helps developers go from concept to production with spec-driven development.

Frank Spiess

Published Aug 28, 2025

Last modified Jan 4, 2026

Introducing Kiro: Your AI-Powered Development Companion!Say goodbye to tedious coding workflows! Kiro IDE revolutionizes the way you code by transforming your ideas into production-ready solutions. Here's what makes it amazing:
✨ Prompt-to-Spec Conversion 
💻 Automated Code Generation 
📝 Built-in Documentation 
🧪 Integrated Test Creation 
🤖 AI Agents for Problem-Solving
As shown in the screenshot, this article guides you through the way that the "Spec" type of Kiro works. "Vibe" is another option which rather focuses on rapid exploration and testing.
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So let's get started with creating our first project. To start simple, this cost-saving idea should be converted into a full spec-driven project:
Idea: A Lambda Function that can shutdown all of our EC2 instances that are tagged with AutoShutdown=yes.So how do we start?
Open a new Kiro window, click "Open a project", create a new folder.
Kiro presents the above choice "Vibe or Spec". Choose Spec.
In the input field below, showing "Ask a question or describe a task", insert the above Idea text.
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You might say, this project looks to simple to be spec-driven, but this approach will allow us to get a quicker understanding how the flow works. Later, you can create larger projects :-)
Submit - and this is where the magic happens. Now, Kiro creates a project folder structure for you, which will contain a specification folder, named along the lines of your input. In our case, the folders will look like this:
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Pay attention to the requirements.md -> this is the document that Kiro created based on your input, and it contains a list of comprehensive user stories, including acceptance criteria, to detail and clarify what you want to accomplish.
You might say "but there is quite some guessing here" -> yes indeed, and that is why your task is now to go through the user stories and check whether they look good or if you like changes to be made. If so, go ahead and sharpen and correct the requirement document as needed.
To allow you how the specific document looks like, I have prepared it for you, look here:  https://github.com/typex1/Kiro-EC2AutoShutdown/blob/main/.kiro/specs/ec2-auto-shutdown-lambda/requirements.md 
Great - this is the first part of our specification!
What's next? The design.md document - Kiro will create it for you, and again, you then have the chance to correct, shorten, or change that document as well. 
Updated project structure:
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The design document will name technical details of how the solution should be implemented, even including a flow diagram of the overall EC2 shutdown logic: 
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Check out the design.md here:  https://github.com/typex1/Kiro-EC2AutoShutdown/blob/main/.kiro/specs/ec2-auto-shutdown-lambda/design.md 
Finally, the implementation plan is created, named tasks.md ->  https://github.com/typex1/Kiro-EC2AutoShutdown/blob/main/.kiro/specs/ec2-auto-shutdown-lambda/tasks.md 
Updated project structure:
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What's left? Implementing each task from the task list. So then click the first "Start task" link in the task.md, and Kiro will fully build that first task for you!
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Go through the task list, watch Kiro implement each task, create the tests, runs them, and finally telling you that the task is done.
Go from one task to the next, until you are done! The fully built project is available in the above GitHub repo.
What has been skipped? To keep the article simple, I have skipped the option "Steering Documents". I will cover that in my next article! Stay tuned.