From Idea to Production: Building a Secure Image Crawler with Kiro's AI-Powered Development

In Post, I like to share,
How I leveraged Kiro's spec-driven approach, agent hooks, and intelligent steering to build a full-stack web crawler in record time

Demo Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMU6n6xW2IQ

🎯 The Challenge: Building Beyond "Vibe Coding"
We've all been there – starting a project with a vague idea, jumping straight into coding, and ending up with a tangled mess of half-implemented features. When I decided to build Image Collector, a secure web crawler for discovering and downloading website images, I knew I needed a different approach.

Enter Kiro – an agentic AI IDE that transforms how we build software from prototype to production. Instead of "vibe coding" my way through another project, I embraced Kiro's structured, spec-driven development approach.

🏗️ The Project: Image Collector
Before diving into my Kiro experience, let me introduce what we built:

Image Collector is a full-stack React application that ethically crawls websites to discover and display images in an interactive gallery. Think of it as a polite, intelligent web scraper that respects robots.txt, implements proper rate limiting, and provides secure bulk downloads.

Key Features:
🤖 Ethical Crawling: Respects robots.txt and nofollow directives
🎨 Interactive Gallery: Responsive carousel and grid views with full-screen preview
🔒 Secure Downloads: Background service worker with comprehensive security validation
📱 Modern UI: Material-UI dark theme with responsive design
⚡ Smart Discovery: Crawls main page plus one level of internal links (same domain only)
Source Code: https://github.com/amarpreetbhatia/imgcollector

🎪 My Favorite Kiro Features: The Game Changers

🎯 1. Steering - Project-Wide Intelligence
Kiro's steering files set standards for code generation including technology stack, project structure, and naming conventions. Here's how I used it:

Technology Stack Enforcement: Automatically ensured all components used TypeScript + Material-UI
Security Standards: Embedded security-first principles into every code generation
Architectural Consistency: Maintained clean separation between frontend/backend concerns

🪝 2. Agent Hooks - Automation That Actually Works
Hooks are user prompts triggered by file changes, enabling consistency and quality across development. My automated workflows:

Test Generation: Auto-created comprehensive test suites when saving React components
Documentation Updates: Automatically updated README and inline docs on architecture changes
Security Audits: Triggered security validation checks on service worker modifications

📋 3. Specs - From Chaos to Clarity
Kiro's structured specifications break down complex features into detailed implementation plans. This transformed my development:

Feature Breakdown: Complex crawling logic became manageable, tracked tasks
Progress Tracking: Real-time visibility into implementation progress
Quality Assurance: Built-in validation and testing requirements for each component
💬 Structuring Conversations with Kiro: The Art of AI Collaboration
The Initial Architecture Discussion
Instead of diving straight into code, I started with high-level architectural conversations:

Me: "I want to build a web crawler that can extract images from websites.
It needs to be ethical, secure, and have a modern UI. Can you help me
structure this as a full-stack application?"
Kiro: Generated comprehensive spec covering:

• Client-server architecture to bypass CORS
• Security considerations for web crawling
• Progressive web app structure
• Service worker architecture for downloads

The Most Impressive Code Generation
The Service Worker Security System was where Kiro truly shined. I described my security requirements in natural language:

Me: "I need a download system that can handle multiple images securely,
with file size limits, MIME type validation, and progress tracking.
It should work in the background without blocking the UI."
Kiro: Generated a complete 300+ line service worker with:

• Semaphore-based concurrency control
• Multi-layer security validation
• Progress callback system
• Automatic resource cleanup
• Error handling and recovery

The generated code included sophisticated patterns I hadn't even thought of, like the semaphore implementation for download concurrency:

javascript
class Semaphore {
  constructor(maxConcurrency) {
    this.maxConcurrency = maxConcurrency;
    this.currentConcurrency = 0;
    this.queue = [];
  }

  async acquire(task) {
    // Intelligent queuing and execution logic
    // Auto-releases on completion
  }
}

Conversational Debugging Sessions
When I encountered CORS issues during development, our conversation looked like:

Me: "The frontend can't directly access external websites due to CORS.
How should I restructure this?"
Kiro: Immediately suggested:

• Move crawling logic to Express backend
• Use Cheerio for HTML parsing
• Implement proper error boundaries
• Add request timeout and retry logic

🪝 Agent Hooks: Automating My Development Workflow

1. Automated Test Generation Hook Created a hook that triggers whenever I save a React component:

yaml

.kiro/hooks/test-generator.md

trigger: file_change
pattern: "src/components/*.tsx"
prompt: |
Generate comprehensive tests for this component including:

• Unit tests for all props and states
• Integration tests for user interactions
• Error boundary testing
• Accessibility testing with React Testing Library Impact: Went from manually writing tests (often skipping them under time pressure) to having comprehensive test coverage automatically generated. My test coverage jumped from ~30% to 85%+.

1. Security Audit Hook Triggers on changes to security-critical files:

yaml

.kiro/hooks/security-audit.md

trigger: file_change

pattern: "public/download-worker.js|src/utils/securityConfig.ts"
prompt: |
Review this file for security vulnerabilities:

• Input validation gaps
• Injection attack vectors
• Resource exhaustion risks
• Data sanitization issues Create issues for any problems found. Impact: Caught potential security issues before they made it to production. Identified and fixed a resource exhaustion vulnerability in the download system.

1. Documentation Sync Hook Keeps documentation fresh with code changes:

yaml

.kiro/hooks/doc-sync.md

trigger: file_change
pattern: "src//*.ts|src//.tsx|server//.js"

prompt: |
Update relevant documentation for these code changes:

• Update README if architecture changed
• Update inline comments for complex functions
• Update type definitions documentation Maintain consistent markdown formatting. Impact: Documentation stayed synchronized without manual effort. The comprehensive README you see was largely maintained through this hook.

📋 Spec-Driven Development: My Secret Weapon
Structuring the Master Spec
Instead of building features ad-hoc, I created a comprehensive spec that became my north star:

🚀 Development Workflow: The Kiro Advantage
Traditional Development vs. Kiro-Powered Development
Traditional Workflow:

Idea → Code → Debug → Refactor → Test → Deploy
Kiro-Powered Workflow:

Idea → Spec → Generate → Validate → Hook-Automation → Deploy
The Numbers Don't Lie

Application uses:

• E-commerce Crawlers: Product image collection and analysis
• Content Management: Automated image optimization and metadata extraction
• SEO Analysis: Website visual content auditing
• Design Research: Competitor visual analysis tools
• AI Agent: Can connect the images to AI workflow to generate something new.

Check out the project: GitHub - Image Collector
https://github.com/amarpreetbhatia/imgcollector

Built with ❤️ using @kirodotdev spec-driven development. All code is open source and production-ready.

Tags: #AI #WebDevelopment #React #NodeJS #Security #Automation #Kiro #FullStack #WebCrawling #hookedonkiro