Imagining Dragons

Editor’s Note: I wrote the first draft of this post back in December, before I’d truly discovered Claude Code. Not sure it’d play out this same way now, several months later. I really ought to get back to it and find out.

I used Amazon Kiro to build a thing that I hope to publish eventually. But in the meantime, I’ll share an anecdote from my experience with it.

The spec-driven development model makes a lot of sense to me. In a few minutes with Kiro, I thought I had a solid description of what I wanted to build. Kicked off the tasks, let things cook for a while, and after a bit, I was told things were ready to test.

Not quite sure where to begin, I asked for a full end-to-end walkthrough in the README. The model wrote a great one with detailed, step-by-step command line instructions. I was excited to try it out. Opened up my terminal, Ctrl-C Ctrl-V-ed the first command, and… error: option not supported.

Tried another one, same thing. Weird.

Did a bit more investigation and came to a shocking realization: Kiro had hallucinated the entire walkthrough.

At first I was upset, but in truth, it was okay! Because I just told Kiro to read the README in detail, and turn the walkthrough into reality by building all the stuff it had invented, and retroactively put it in the spec.

Legitimate approach? Perhaps. But next time, maybe I’ll have it build the experience first, and then the code? Work backwards from the customer, anyone?