I Built a Journal That Rewrites Your Past (Thanks, Kiro)

Ever written "Had coffee this morning" in your journal, refreshed the page, and found it now says "Had coffee this morning ...the void watches..."? No? Just me? Well, that's exactly what I built for the Kiroween hackathon—a horror journal where time literally breaks. Entries appear from the future with corrupted text, your old words rewrite themselves with ominous phrases, and timelines split into parallel realities. The twist? I built the entire thing in one session using Kiro IDE's spec-driven workflow. Kiro turned my 2 AM idea into 9 formal requirements, designed 11 components with complete data models, broke it into 33 sequential tasks, then helped me vibe-code the whole thing into existence. The result: 30+ files with glitch effects, timeline visualization, temporal cursor trails, and zero TypeScript errors. The best part? Kiro generated text distortion algorithms that felt genuinely creepy—reversed words, glitch characters (▇█▓), and phrases like "...time fractures..." without me explaining how to be unsettling. It just understood the vibe. Specs prevented architectural chaos, vibe coding handled execution, and together they saved me 12-17 hours of refactoring hell. The horror isn't jump scares—it's the slow realization that your interface is lying to you. And Kiro made building that betrayal terrifyingly easy.