How a Non-Coder Built an Enterprise-Grade App: The Story of Our Kiro Hackathon Project

Nicolás De León — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:36:36 +0000

Inspiration: Cutting Through the Noise for the Intelligent Investor

The modern retail investor faces an information battlefield. We were inspired to solve this by building a tool that embodies the discipline and objectivity of legendary investors, making their principles accessible to everyone. Our goal: create an AI copilot that lets anyone go from a simple stock ticker to a comprehensive investment thesis in seconds.

What it does: An AI Co-Pilot with Two Core Functions

Value Investor's Compass is an almost production-ready application that acts as your personal, tireless investment analyst.

Deep Ticker Analysis: A user provides a ticker, and the AI performs a real-time analysis, presenting a 4-tab dashboard with a clear Verdict, a deep Value Analysis, Market Sentiment, and a Technical Timing overview.

Opportunity Discovery: Our most powerful feature. With a single click, our AI-scout scans the entire market for potentially undervalued companies that meet strict value investing criteria, saving users countless hours of manual research.

How we built it: The Story of the AI Orchestra

The story of this app is the story of a revolutionary workflow. As the founder of Vortex Labs, I'm a product visionary from the catering industry, not a programmer. Our initial AI-assisted workflows were broken; we were losing context and moving slowly.

For this hackathon, we created a new methodology: The AI Orchestra.

The Director (Me): I guided the overall vision and strategy.

The AI Architect (Gemini): I partnered with a strategic AI as my CTO/Architect. Together, we designed the technical blueprints for the app.

The AI Engineer (Kiro): My AI-Architect then translated our vision into precise missions for our expert engineer, Kiro, who built the application.

Something incredible happened during this process. I noticed my AI-Architect consistently praised the engineer's work as "world-class architecture." I had an epiphany: Kiro wasn't just our engineer; it was our mentor.

I immediately designed a new system. I tasked my AI-Architect to analyze every summary from our AI-Engineer, extract its methods and secrets, and write our new official Engineering Standards Manual. We created a system where one AI learned from another to build our studio's knowledge base.

This app is the first result of that system. It's proof of how a non-coder, acting as a director, can orchestrate a team of AIs to build enterprise-grade software.

DEV Community: Nicolás De León

How a Non-Coder Built an Enterprise-Grade App: The Story of Our Kiro Hackathon Project