Agentic Conf Hamburg 2026

Kiro Made Me Do It

Falling Back in Love with Coding (the Hard Way)

Marvin Kruse

Technical Lead at OTTO

About Me

Role Technical Lead at OTTO

Since June 2024

Previously Statista & AIRBUS

Focus Architecture, Distributed Systems, Sharing Knowledge, Home Lab Enthusiast, Music Lover, Full-time Dad

Degree Dipl. Wirtschaftsinformatik, Uni Hamburg

The Problem: "I Want to Code, But..."

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

8:00

9:00

10:00

11:00

12:00

13:00

14:00

15:00

16:00

17:00

Team Advice Session

Advisory Board: Platform

Workshop Prep: Architecture

Lunch

1:1 Marathon

👧 Daughter Time

🎪 Full-Day Workshop: Tech Strategy

Team Advice Session

This meeting could have been an email

Cross-Team Dependency Untangling

Lunch (if lucky)

Hiring Interview

👧 Daughter Time

Advisory Board: Data

Roadmap Review (Q47)

Tech Lead Sync about the last Sync

Stakeholder Update

Meeting about the meeting schedule

Team Advice Session

Workshop: How to have fewer meetings

Demo (pray the deploy worked)

Lunch

✨ Actual Coding Time ✨

👧 Daughter Time

🧱 Duplo duty after work 🧠 Brain says: sleep 💻 But I still want to build ⏰ Maybe 30 min on the couch

💥 Result: segfault

First Try: ChatGPT & "Vibe Coding"

💡

Just prompt and go — no plan, no spec

🚀

Tons of output in no time

🎲

Mileage may vary — results are hit or miss

🔄

Context lost between sessions — starting over. Again.

More frustrating than productive.

The Fix: Kiro & Spec-Driven Development

📝

Spec first — Requirements, Design, Tasks, then Code

🏠

Everything lives in one place (the IDE)

🧭

Structure instead of chaos

✅

AI follows your spec, not its own ideas

Spec-Driven Flow in Kiro

psst... you can start here now!

1 Requirements Structured, Given/When/Then

→

2 Design Architecture, APIs, data models

→

3 Tasks Isolated, testable steps

→

4 Code Implementation guided by spec

＋ Steering Documents — re-use across projects, guiding all phases

What I Love About Kiro

🏠

Everything in one IDE — specs, design, tasks, code. No hand-off, no context switching.

🎯

Curated model selection — limited, but reduced to the best. Less choice, more focus.

🪝

Hooks & Steering Documents — seamlessly integrated, guiding the agent across all phases.

🤖

The agent just crunches through your tasks — spec to code, step by step.

What Hurts

✍️

Writing specs requires a mental shift — from "this button, that component" to precise intent

👻

Agent progress is unclear — is it still running? Thinking? Gone?

🧪

Kiro loves writing tests — sometimes way too many, running forever or not returning at all

🎨

LLMs are creative — gaps get filled with solutions that sometimes fit perfectly, sometimes not at all

📝

Auto-summary keeps context in check — but can stall you mid-flow when you just want to keep going

What I Built (and What's Next)

Personal 💿

collectio

Sync my physical CD collection from Discogs to Tidal

Personal 💰

haushaltsbuch

Local-only financial dashboard from bank Excel exports

Personal ☁️

gimmecloud

Personal PaaS for my home lab — deploy with one command

@ OTTO 📐

acc-cli

Architecture Communication Canvas — Markdown to HTML

Coming Soon 🔍

Rockybeach

Die Drei ??? fan site with curated metadata search engine

I fell back in love with coding —
not because AI writes code for me,
but because it finally fits into my life.

— Marvin Kruse

Thank You!

💼 linkedin.com/in/marvin-kruse

Kiro.dev Spec-Driven Development OTTO Tech Blog