Kiro made me do it: Falling back in love with coding (the hard way)

As Technical Lead, finding time for hands-on coding can be surprisingly hard — especially when balancing day-to-day responsibilities and life outside of work. In this talk, Marvin shares his personal journey of rediscovering the joy of building software with the help of Kiro by AWS.

Kiro's spec driven approach felt like a refreshing alternative to so called "vibe coding" to me: more structure, clearer intent, and faster progress from idea to running software. And everything in one single place: the Kiro IDE. But that structure comes at a price. Writing precise specifications turned out to be far more challenging than expected, and blindly trusting generated output quickly led to moments of unexpected results.

This talk takes an honest, experience driven look at where spec driven AI tools truly shine, where they introduce new kinds of complexity, and why solid software engineering fundamentals are still essential — even (and especially) when AI is doing most of the typing.