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Gabriel Okemwa
Gabriel Okemwa

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🎃 Resurrecting Dead Tech: Turning a 1990s Fax Machine into a Portal to the Afterlife

#kiro #kiroween #opensource #ai

## 🎃 Resurrecting Dead Tech: Turning a 1990s Fax Machine into a Portal to the Afterlife

How I transformed dead office hardware into a haunted AI storytelling machine with Kiro.

Fax machines died long ago.

Their screeching modem noises, paper jams, thermal ink streaks, and endless “LINE BUSY” errors feel like relics from another lifetime — and honestly, they are.

So for Kiroween, when the challenge was to resurrect dead technology, I decided to bring back the fax machine…
but not for office work.

I resurrected it as something far more fun, spooky, and unexpected:

GhostFax — the Afterlife Fax Machine:
A haunted retro fax terminal that lets you send messages to the dead… and receive faxes back.

Built with Kiro, GhostFax is part resurrection, part dark comedy, part storytelling engine, and part retro office nightmare — all wrapped inside a perfectly nostalgic 1990s fax machine UI.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the idea, the build, the tech, and how Kiro transformed my development workflow.

👻 The Idea: What If a Fax Machine Could Reach Beyond the Veil?

Instead of faxing PDFs to a phone number, the user faxes messages to…

  • Limbo
  • The Afterlife DMV
  • The Underworld
  • Heaven Triage
  • The Lost & Found Dimension
  • The Archive of Dead Startups
  • Obsolete Tech Spirits
  • Ancestors, ghosts, and forgotten objects

When the user hits SEND FAX, the terminal:

  • dials through analog static
  • screeches like a haunted modem
  • flickers like a CRT losing signal
  • “pierces the veil”
  • transmits the message into the afterlife

And moments later…

A fax prints back.

A real AI-generated fax from the chosen realm — complete with:

  • ethereal seals
  • corrupted ASCII art
  • glitchy characters
  • bureaucratic afterlife stamps
  • cosmic disclaimers
  • ghostly personality
  • lore about who in the afterlife processed your message

It’s absurd.
It’s spooky.
It’s ridiculously fun.

And most importantly for Kiroween…

It is a resurrection of dead tech reinvented for a whole new purpose.

📠 The Core Experience (Built on a Fully Retro Fax UI)

I built the original version of this project as FaxGPT — a retro-themed AI fax simulator with:

  • a 1990s beige plastic theme
  • pixel fonts
  • CRT scanline overlays
  • WebAudio fax sounds
  • an old-school LCD status panel
  • paper-feed animations
  • simulated fax transmission flow

For Kiroween, I transformed it entirely into GhostFax.

GhostFax adds:

✔️ Interdimensional realms
✔️ Supernatural recipients
✔️ Haunted “transmission” sequences
✔️ Outbound & inbound ghostly faxes
✔️ Realm-based reply templates
✔️ Spooky AI lore generation
✔️ A metaphysical fax routing system
✔️ Error messages from beyond
✔️ Ethereal seals & a horror-fax aesthetic

Instead of a boring office utility, the fax machine becomes:

A haunted portal for supernatural correspondence.

The same UI — but a completely new purpose, experience, and magic.

⚙️ How I Used Kiro to Build GhostFax

This section is critical for judging.

Kiro wasn’t just a coding assistant — it became my co-designer, creative partner, prompt engineer, and automation system.

Here’s how:

🧪 1. Vibe Coding — Brainstorming the Afterlife

I used vibe coding sessions in Kiro to:

  • brainstorm the realms of the afterlife
  • create supernatural bureaucratic departments
  • invent personalities for demons, angels, and lost socks
  • design glitched ASCII seal stamps
  • come up with fax-error messages like:

“VEIL INTERFERENCE: Please realign your mortal frequency.”

The creativity was 🔥.

These back-and-forth sessions shaped the entire GhostFax universe.

📐 2. Spec-Driven Development — Formalizing the GhostFax Universe

Once the creative ideas were solid, I used Kiro’s spec system to formalize everything:

  • realm definitions
  • AI prompt templates
  • fax header formats
  • supernatural personality rules
  • glitch parameters
  • archive schemas

Specs turned the spooky vibe into a robust, consistent data model.

Every realm has:

name:
tone:
response_style:
header_template:
seal_template:
glitch_intensity:
forbidden_knowledge_probability:
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Kiro then auto-generated code and UI components for each realm based on the specs.

This massively improved consistency and reduced manual work.

🔁 3. Agent Hooks — Automating the Haunted Pipeline

The magic of GhostFax comes from automated supernatural workflows.

I built hooks in /.kiro that run whenever:

  • a new fax is sent
  • a new realm is added
  • a reply is generated
  • an entity or lore system changes

Hooks trigger:

  • reply fax formatting
  • glitch-stylizing
  • seal stamping
  • AI classification
  • cosmic routing logs
  • “afterlife delivery delays”

Hooks turned GhostFax into a self-expanding haunted system.

🧭 4. Steering Docs — Maintaining Tone & Lore Consistency

GhostFax needed a very specific tone:

  • spooky
  • funny
  • bureaucratic
  • slightly broken
  • distinctly “fax-like”

I wrote a steering doc to enforce:

  • the narrative style
  • realm personalities
  • consistent metaphors
  • the supernatural office aesthetic
  • constraints (“no modern slang”, “responses must feel analog”)

This ensured the app stayed cohesive and immersive no matter how many faxes were sent.

🔌 5. MCP — Extending Kiro with Supernatural Tools

To really push creativity, I used MCP to create custom tools:

  • glitch generator (overstriking, ASCII corruption)
  • noise texture generator (for haunted fax pages)
  • afterlife-seal renderer (ASCII-paid stamp tool)
  • haunting redaction engine

These tools let Kiro produce rich, spooky document artifacts automatically.

They elevated GhostFax from “AI chatbot” to a full-blown horror-office simulation.

🛠️ Tech Stack Behind the Haunting

GhostFax runs on:

  • Next.js 15 (App Router)
  • TypeScript
  • TailwindCSS (custom retro-beige theme)
  • Supabase (archive & storage)
  • WebAudio API (fax noises, static, haunted ambience)
  • OpenAI for AI generation
  • Kiro for specs, steering, hooks, vibe coding

No fax APIs.
No costs.
No external dependencies.

Just pure, haunted creativity.

🧛‍♀️ Challenges (and Why They Were Fun)

  • Making the fake fax transmissions FEEL real
  • Designing believable afterlife bureaucracies
  • Crafting glitch effects that look intentional
  • Building reply formats that feel “printed from beyond”
  • Ensuring Kiro stayed spooky and not too modern
  • Mapping realms to their own aesthetic and voice

Each challenge was solved with a mix of:

  • thoughtful design
  • prompt engineering
  • Kiro specs
  • custom hooks and tools
  • a lot of dark humor

🧟 The Result: A Fax Machine That Should Not Exist

GhostFax delivers an experience that is:

  • retro
  • haunted
  • weird
  • funny
  • emotionally surprising
  • deeply original
  • and powered entirely by modern AI and developer tooling

It’s exactly the spirit of Kiroween:
resurrecting dead tech and turning it into something unforgettable.

👋 Closing Thoughts: Kiro Changed My Entire Workflow

Kiro didn’t just help me write code — it helped me:

  • brainstorm
  • worldbuild
  • structure
  • enforce tone
  • generate assets
  • automate workflows
  • maintain style consistency
  • and turn a wild idea into a polished product

GhostFax would NOT exist without Kiro.

And honestly, that’s the best proof of how powerful Kiro is:
It empowered me to resurrect dead tech in a way that feels alive, spooky, and wildly creative.

🔗 Links

https://ghostfax.vercel.app

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