🪄 Demo
Background:
Kiroween is a Halloween-themed hackathon hosted by AWS to showcase the power of Kiro, their AI coding agent. The challenge:
build something ambitious. creative in under a month.
For me, this was a really getting into the unknown.
My first time mixing AI, gothic aesthetics, multi-module UI architecture, and advanced agent workflows .
What came out of the darkness… was Soulbound Codex, a fully-featured productivity suite transformed into a spooky, immersive experience.
🕯️ What I Built: Soulbound Codex
Kiroween is a dark-themed productivity platform where:
✍️ Ghost Writer gives live AI writing suggestions
📖 Necronomicon Notes lets you write inside an ancient, animated tome
⚰️ Graveyard Dashboard turns tasks into tombstones with physics and ritual animations
🔮 Terminal Tarot analyzes your git commits and generates tarot readings
🌕 Moon Phase Calendar tracks time with astronomical accuracy
🕸️ Ambient soundscapes and gothic UI make the whole experience atmospheric and magical
Everything is powered through a combination of:
React, TypeScript, Vite, CSS Modules, Firebase, OpenRouter AI, and Kiro’s spec-driven development workflow.
🧠 Technical Achievements
The big wins:
Full multi-module React architecture with shared state and offline-first design
AI writing assistant powered by NVIDIA Nemotron + OpenRouter fallback
Git-based divination engine using isomorphic-git directly in the browser
Cloud sync with Firebase (auth, database, storage)
Custom gothic animations, particle effects, and parchment rendering
Keyboard-driven navigation for power users
Theme engine with instant switching
Import/export system for notes & tasks
Accessibility enhancements layered into all modules
This wasn’t just a themed UI — it’s a real productivity platform.
⚡ How Kiro Helped
Kiro wasn’t just a tool — it was a development partner.
I used:
Spec-Driven Development
Everything began with .kiro/specs describing requirements, UX behavior, and architectural patterns.
Kiro converted these into clean modular code. No rework. No ambiguity.
Steering Docs
These controlled:
Visual style consistency
Tone & personality of AI responses
Coding conventions
Architecture boundaries
Agent Hooks
Automated workflows like:
Context extraction in Ghost Writer
Auto-generating test stubs
Sentence-completion triggers
Analysis pipelines for Terminal Tarot
New Kiro Features that supercharged development:
Property-based testing that validated feature specs against implementation
Checkpoints that let me rewind Kiro’s code changes at any moment
Kiro CLI for running custom agents inside my terminal
Team-oriented workflows with centralized spec + steering management
Building Kiroween without Kiro would have taken months, not weeks.
⚰️ Barriers I Faced
⏳ Time pressure
I was juggling work, life, and a huge multi-module project.
Some nights I only had 30–60 minutes to code.
🧩 Complex feature interactions
Notes, tasks, AI suggestions, tarot readings — all needed:
Shared global state
Cross-module navigation
Offline persistence
High performance
👻 UI Precision
Ghost animations, parchment effects, moon phases — every aesthetic choice needed careful tuning.
🔌 AI integration unpredictability
Different models behave differently.
Caching, retries, fallbacks — all had to be built manually.
🌐 Git analysis in the browser
Doing commit parsing locally without a server was extremely challenging.
But every obstacle pushed the project forward.
🗓️ Development Timeline (Condensed)
Day 1–3: Foundations
Core React architecture
Navigation
Theme engine
Notes scaffold
Task system prototype
Day 4–6: Feature Expansion
Ghost Writer AI integration
Graveyard Dashboard animations
Moon Phase calendar
Markdown editor
Day 7–10: Advanced Systems
Git commit analysis engine
Tarot generation logic
AI caching + fallback system
Cloud sync
Authentication
Day 11–14: Polish & Stability
Particle effects
Keyboard shortcuts
Import/export
Accessibility
Final bug hunts
Documentation
By the end, Kiroween had 4 full modules, dozens of features, tests, and a cohesive UX.
🎯 What I Learned
💡 AI-assisted development is a new paradigm
AI isn’t replacing developers — it’s amplifying them.
Kiro turned weeks of boilerplate into minutes.
🧠 Specs matter more than ever
Clear specs = perfect code generation.
Vague specs = confusion.
⚙️ Offline-first architecture is underrated
Design for offline first. Sync second.
Everything becomes more robust.
🎨 Aesthetic has functional power
Making productivity beautiful makes people stay longer and return more often.
🪦 Ritual beats routine
A task “sinking into the ground” gives emotional closure no checkbox ever could.
💭 Final Thoughts
Building Kiroween felt like walking through a dark forest with a lantern — each step illuminated by Kiro, but the path always full of mystery.
It taught me:
How to build complex software fast with AI
How design affects user emotion
How to plan, structure, and ship under pressure
Most importantly, Kiroween showed me that productivity tools don’t need to be boring. They can be atmospheric, magical, and deeply personal.
If you want a tool that turns everyday tasks into rituals — Kiroween is for you.
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