Building and Shipping Apps Faster with Kiro’s Agentic Power - (Let's Build 🏗️ Series)

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

What if you could go from a blank screen to a fully deployed serverless API—API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and all—in under an hour? Kiro, AWS’s agentic IDE, makes that possible. You describe what you want in plain English, and Kiro generates the spec, the infrastructure, and the application code.

In this article we’ll walk through building a complete serverless CRUD API with Kiro and Terraform.

Prerequisites

• AWS account with credentials configured
• Node.js installed
• Kiro IDE installed –
• Terraform installed –

Setup

1. Open Kiro IDE
2. Create a new project folder (e.g., kiro-serverless-api)
3. Open the project in Kiro

Describe the Desired Application

Open Kiro’s spec panel and enter a natural‑language description, for example:

“Build a CRUD REST API for managing tasks. Each task has an id, title, description, status, and createdAt. Use API Gateway for HTTP endpoints, Lambda for handlers, and DynamoDB for storage. Use Terraform for infrastructure.”

Kiro will then generate:

• A specification document
• A design doc
• A task list

Review and approve the generated plan. Kiro will create the project structure automatically.

Generated Project Structure

• DynamoDB table with partition key id
• Lambda functions for each CRUD operation (create, get, list, update, delete)
• API Gateway REST API with routes mapped to the Lambda functions
• IAM roles granting the Lambdas access to DynamoDB

Example Spec‑Driven Task Checklist

- [ ] 4.2 Create API Gateway methods
    - Define POST method on `/tasks` for task creation
    - Define GET method on `/tasks` for listing all tasks
    - Define GET method on `/tasks/{id}` for retrieving a specific task
    - Define PUT method on `/tasks/{id}` for updating a task
    - Define DELETE method on `/tasks/{id}` for deleting a task
    - Set authorization to NONE for all methods
    - _Requirements: 7.1, 7.4_

Walk through each generated task, review the code, and approve.

Deploy with Terraform

# Install project dependencies
npm install

# Change to the infrastructure directory
cd infra

# Initialize Terraform
terraform init

# Review the execution plan
terraform plan

# Apply the changes (type "yes" when prompted)
terraform apply

After the apply completes, note the API Gateway endpoint URL from the Terraform output and verify that all endpoints function as expected.

Clean Up

When you’re finished testing, destroy the resources:

cd infra && terraform destroy   # type "yes" when prompted

Summary

• Spec‑driven workflow: describe → spec → design → tasks → code
• Kiro generates Terraform HCL files for AWS infrastructure and Lambda handlers from the spec.
• Infrastructure and application code are created together, enabling a fully deployed serverless API with minimal manual coding.

Happy coding!