Kiro Did It! – From Prompt to Customer API Using Vibe Coding!

Hi! I’m Girish, an AWS Community Builder and Cloud Tech Enthusiast. In this article, I’ll share how I used AWS Kiro’s vibe coding feature to build a Customer Lookup API powered by API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and AWS SAM.

Unlike traditional IDEs, vibe coding in Kiro lets you code in flow with lightweight prompts—no need to over-specify requirements up front. It’s perfect for experimenting, prototyping, and just “vibing” with code.

Instead of manually wiring services together, I simply gave Kiro a natural-language prompt describing what I wanted, and within minutes I had a working, deployable prototype. That’s the magic of vibe coding!

What did I build and why?

I wanted to create a quick Customer Lookup API to demonstrate how fast you can go from an idea to a working solution using Kiro’s vibe coding feature. Instead of manually setting up AWS resources, I described my requirements in plain English, and Kiro generated the project for me.

Here’s what I ended up with:

• A REST API hosted on API Gateway
• This API supports CRUD operations:
• GET /customers – List all customers
• GET /customers/{custId} – Retrieve a specific customer
• POST /customers – Create a new customer
• PUT /customers/{custId} – Update an existing customer
• DELETE /customers/{custId} – Delete a customer
• A Lambda function for handling requests
• A DynamoDB table to store customer data (custId, Name, State, Zipcode)
• An AWS SAM template for building and deploying the entire stack
• Sample JSON events can be used to test the API.

The goal wasn’t to build a production-ready API right away, but to get a working prototype fast, something I can extend later with authentication, observability, monitoring, and performance tuning.

Architecture Overview

Here’s a quick look at how the components work together:

Review Steps: From Prompt to Prototype

Step 1: Start a Vibe Coding Session

Open Kiro, switch to vibe coding mode, and simply type a natural prompt like:

"Build a customer lookup api as rest api. api will be hosted using aws gateway, integrated with a lambda function, data will be stored in a DynamoDB table, create a simple table to store this data with four fields - custId, Name, state, zipcode. do not create test framework as need to get a quick working prototype first before adding testing and performance framework. I would like to use AWS SAM to build and deploy this solution."

Kiro responded to me with below answer:

Step 2: Kiro Generates the Project files

In seconds, Kiro produced:

• A SAM template (template.yaml)
• A Lambda function (app.py)
• A DynamoDB table definition
• Sample JSON Events to test the API with

Example SAM template (simplified):

Step 3: Review the Lambda Function

Kiro generated a Python handler with DynamoDB integration:

Review Sample JSON Event

Step 4: Build & Deploy with SAM

Once I reviewed the files, it was just a matter of building and deploying.

Use the following command to build the function:

Command: sam build

You can deploy it to the AWS Cloud using the sam deploy command:

Command: sam deploy

Change Set

SAM packaged and deployed the API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB resources in my AWS account.

Review using AWS Console

Since the resources have been deployed in my AWS account, I logged in to the AWS Management Console to verify them.

Here’s what I checked:

• API Gateway – Confirmed the REST API with all CRUD endpoints (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
• Lambda Function – Validated that the function was created and linked to API Gateway.
• DynamoDB Table – Verified the customers table with attributes (custId, Name, State, Zipcode).
• CloudFormation / SAM Stack – Ensured the stack deployed successfully with all resources.

Step 5: Test the API

Now that I have the API endpoint, I will use the Postman to invoke the API and will review the response returned.

However before I invoke a GET request, I will use the command line to POST a record via API that will be stored in the DynamoDB CustomerTable.

Command: curl -X POST https://21374mswxh.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod/customers \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"custId":"CUST001", "name":"Girish", "state":"NY", "zipcode":"10001"}'

I will now invoke GET on this API endpoint using Postman. This should return the record that I added to the database.

This is a CRUD API, so it supports other operations as well. For this demonstration, however, I focused on POST and GETrequests, to create a record and fetch a record through the API endpoint.

Cleaning Up Resources

To avoid charges, don’t forget to clean up:

Since these resources were build and deployed using AWS SAM, these can be deleted using AWS SAM command.

Command: sam delete

Conclusion

In this article, I demonstrated how Kiro made it effortless to create a fully functional CRUD Customer Lookup REST APIintegrated with a database, using vibe coding to quickly build a working prototype.

Not only was the API generated, but an AWS SAM template was also created to support create, update, destroy, and recreate scenarios with Infrastructure as Code.

Generative AI is transforming the way code is built, and tools like Kiro make the process even easier. While debugging can become more challenging as more code is generated with GenAI, Kiro’s features such as spec-driven development and design documentation generation can help address these challenges.

I believe this is just the beginning, and these tools will continue to evolve rapidly!

I hope you found this helpful and informative.

Thank you for reading!

Watch the video here:

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