To begin with, I must admit that my acquaintance with Kiro started earlier this year during the Code with Kiro hackathon. Being skeptical of this freshly released AI-driven IDE, I completely changed my mind by the end of my journey. Every update made Kiro better, and I felt that it is transforming from somewhat buggish and slow-to-react coding assistant into a powerful and smart coding environment. Today, to be honest, I use Kiro IDE instead of my first love – VS Code. Thank God, Kiro has almost the same user-friendly interface as it is a fork of VS Code! But let’s move to the main topic – my participation in Kiroween hackathon. When the hackathon was announced on October 31st, I was excited to join as a participant. This hackathon, in my opinion, is much more difficult than the first one. The tasks provide less freedom for ideas and require a more robust approach and greater knowledge. Besides, you must have good imagination to come up with fascinating ideas about resurrecting some obsolete tech, or creating a spooky app with beautiful designs, or combine several unrelated technologies, etc. I spent almost the entire day trying to come up with an idea for this hackathon. Finally, my choice fell upon resurrecting the punch cards. Most young people may not even know what they are. But I was born in the early 90s, and I remember playing with punch cards when my mother brought them home from work. Later I learned that these tricky-looking cards contained program codes that were used in the factory to control machines. Nostalgic memories made me feel that it would be a good idea to bring this technology back to life. So, the decision was made. Now the main task – to implement the resurrection process using Kiro’s capabilities. First of all, I changed the model to Claude Sonnet 4.5, which is my go-to model for coding (Img. 1).

Img. 1. Claude Sonnet 4.5 - my strong recommendation to get the best results

Then I started asking Kiro if it knew what a punch card is (Img. 2).

Img. 2. Dialogue with Kiro about punch cards

Surprisingly, Kiro knew much about the technology 😉. Therefore, my next step was to give Kiro the hackathon task in the resurrection category. Kiro thought for a few seconds and provided me with a well-structured response, suggesting the brilliant idea of building a VS Code extension called PunchCard Studio to bring this technology back to life. After making some corrections, I asked Kiro to create specifications for building our extension (Img. 3).

Img. 3. Creating specs for our VS Code extension

Kiro provided a detailed requirements.md file. After some minor edits, it satisfied me perfectly, and we moved on to the design and task formation steps (Img. 4).

Img. 4. Specs for PunchCard Studio VS Code extension development

When the tasks were ready and task 1 (in which Kiro set up the project) was completed, I asked Kiro to create steering documents to enhance the building process (Img. 5).

Img. 5. Creating steering documents

I strongly recommend not neglecting the creation of steering documentation— it will save you time, effort, and tokens later during development. Then we started building, and step by step, Kiro solved the tasks one by one. Sometimes, to be honest, my own developer knowledge was required to resolve complex issues that Kiro couldn’t handle on its own (Img. 6). But in general, 90% of the work was performed by Kiro without my manual intervention, and I must admit that this is a significant improvement, considering that other IDEs and earlier versions of Kiro solved only about 60–70% of tasks without manual coding.

Img. 6. Sometimes, Kiro failed to resolve complex issues. But that was extremely rare

As a result, we built a beautiful, professional-looking extension for VS Code, which was successfully installed and tested in Kiro IDE right away (Img. 7)!

Img. 7. Welcome screen of the PunchCard Studio extension

During the testing period, I found several bugs in the extension and I told Kiro to fix them. After several fixes, the extension finally worked as expected. Then we improved the extension’s computational efficiency by simplifying the punch card viewer, making it run faster and more smoothly. The next (and final) step was to publish the extension in the VS Code marketplace and on GitHub, so that everyone could learn about punch card technology and gain a unique personal experience with this outdated, but extremely important, technology. Kiro helped me push my repo to GitHub, and then I manually published my extension in the VS Code marketplace without any trouble (Img. 8).

Img. 8. PunchCard Studio in the VS Code marketplace

I hope this extension will be highly useful for programmers and learners, and that Kiro will continue to delight developers with its functionality!