Building the AI-Native Foundation: How Creating for Kiro Unlocked a New Development Paradigm

For this hackathon, we didn't just build with Kiro. We built for it.

Our project, SkipSetup, started from a simple, frustrating observation that every developer using AI assistants has experienced: the "hallucination gap." You ask for a feature, the AI generates plausible-looking code, and then it breaks because it doesn't understand your project's authentication flow, your database schema, or your API conventions.

We initially blamed the tools. But building with Kiro for #Kiroween revealed a more fundamental truth: The AI isn't the bottleneck. The lack of context is.

Kiro is incredibly capable, but it operates like a brilliant chef walking into a new, unfamiliar kitchen for every single request. It can follow a recipe (the prompt), but it doesn't know where the pots are, how hot the stove runs, or the head chef's signature style.

This insight completely changed our approach. Instead of asking, "How can we use Kiro to write code faster?" we asked a more radical question: "What if the project itself could introduce its architecture to the AI?"

The Birth of an AI-Native Foundation
This led us to create SkipSetup, a CLI tool with a core mission: generate a production-ready, full-stack TypeScript application and its own comprehensive AI context layer.

When you run:

npx skipsetup-cli@latest create my-saas --size medium

In under 90 seconds, you get two core outputs:

1. A Complete SaaS Foundation: A medium-scale project with authentication (Better Auth), database (Prisma), payments (Stripe), an admin dashboard, and monitoring—architected for scale.

2.An AI Context Layer: A .kiro folder that acts as the project's "brain" for AI.

Inside the .kiro "Brain"
This is where the paradigm shift happens. The generated .kiro folder isn't just documentation; it's a structured, runtime-ready context system:

• Specialist Agents: Pre-configured expert profiles like auth-expert.json and database-architect.json that understand the specific libraries and patterns (Better Auth, Prisma) used in this project.
• Live Specifications: Detailed, AI-readable specs/ for the API, database schema, and components. It's the architectural blueprint.
• Steering & Workflows: Guidance in steering/ on how to develop within this architecture, ensuring consistency.
• MCP Configuration: Setup for Model Context Protocol servers, granting the AI direct, safe access to the filesystem and database to understand and manipulate the project.

The Result: Closing the Hallucination Gap
With this foundation, the dynamic with Kiro transforms. You're no longer starting from zero context.

Before (Generic Prompt):

"Hey Kiro, add a user profile page."

Result: A generic component that might not hook into your auth system, may not respect your data fetching patterns (tRPC vs REST), and likely uses the wrong Tailwind classes. You'll spend time fixing integration errors.

After (Context-Aware Development):
"Hey Kiro, add a user profile page."

Result: Kiro, guided by the auth-expert and fullstack-specialist agents and the live api-specifications.md, generates:

• A Prisma schema update for profile fields.
• A type-safe tRPC router for fetching and updating profile data.
• A React component that uses the existing design system, correct auth hooks, and the new tRPC procedures.
• All files are placed in the correct directories, following the established pattern.

The feature is perfectly integrated on the first try. What used to be 3-4 iterations of "vibe coding" and debugging becomes a single, efficient command. Our testing showed this context-aware approach is 10x faster for adding complex features.

What We Learned by Building for AI
This experience taught us core principles for the next era of development tools:

1. Architecture is a Feature: The most significant blocker to velocity isn't writing syntax—it's making consistent, scalable architectural decisions. By baking these decisions into an AI-readable format, we make the entire codebase more maintainable by both humans and AI.
2. Constraint is a Superpower: By constraining the AI to work within a well-defined, sound architecture, we don't limit its creativity—we increase its effectiveness and eliminate whole categories of errors.
3. The Toolchain is Incomplete: Our current dev tools are built for humans. The next generation must be built for human-AI collaboration. This requires a new layer—a context layer—that sits between the raw code and the AI assistant. The Future is AI-Native SkipSetup is more than a project starter. It's a proof-of-concept for AI-native development: the idea that our foundations should be built with AI as a first-class user.

• What does this future look like?
• IDEs that load project-specific AI contexts on startup.
• Frameworks that ship with official AI agent definitions.

A marketplace where teams can share and extend specialist agents for their domain (e-commerce, FinTech, healthcare).

Kiro didn't just change how we write code for this hackathon. It changed our understanding of the fundamental layer that's missing in modern software development. We're no longer just using AI; we're building the ground upon which it can reliably and powerfully stand.

Try building your own AI-native foundation:

npx skipsetup-cli@latest create my-ai-app --size medium

Built for the #Kiroween Hackathon. Let us know what you build on top of it. #kiro #ai #typescript #webdev