Kiro Steering Files

Opinionated workflow steering files for Kiro, adapted from gstack by Garry Tan (President & CEO of Y Combinator).

gstack is a set of workflow skills for Claude Code that encode real engineering rigor — premise challenges, structured code review, QA methodology, and failure mode analysis. This repo extracts those workflows into Kiro steering files and spec templates.

What's included

.kiro/
├── steering/
│   ├── engineering-standards.md   # Always-on coding preferences
│   ├── code-review.md             # Pre-landing review checklist
│   ├── qa-methodology.md          # Structured QA testing approach
│   └── feature-planning.md        # Feature planning framework
└── specs/
    └── templates/
        └── feature-spec.md        # Spec template with architecture + failure modes

File	Inclusion	Purpose
engineering-standards.md	auto	DRY, error handling, security defaults, test standards — applied to all code
code-review.md	manual	SQL safety, race conditions, LLM trust boundaries, enum completeness
qa-methodology.md	manual	Per-page checklist, severity levels, health scoring, framework-specific checks
feature-planning.md	manual	Premise challenge, scope modes, architecture review, error/failure mode mapping

Installation

Copy the .kiro/ folder into your project root:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/kiro-steering.git /tmp/kiro-steering
cp -r /tmp/kiro-steering/.kiro /path/to/your/project/

Or add as a git subtree if you want to pull updates later.

Usage

• engineering-standards.md activates automatically — no action needed
• For code review: type #code-review in Kiro chat before asking for a review
• For QA testing: type #qa-methodology in Kiro chat before testing
• For feature planning: type #feature-planning in Kiro chat before describing a feature

For new specs, copy .kiro/specs/templates/feature-spec.md as your starting point.

How to verify it's working

engineering-standards.md — Kiro will flag DRY violations, suggest specific exception types instead of broad catches, and push back on "swallow and continue" error handling.

#code-review — Output will be structured as Review: N issues (X critical, Y informational) with [file:line] citations.

#qa-methodology — Kiro will follow the per-page checklist, use severity levels, and ask for screenshot evidence.

#feature-planning — Kiro will start with premise challenge, ask you to pick a scope mode, and produce ASCII architecture diagrams.

Credits

The workflows, checklists, and methodology in these files are adapted from gstack by Garry Tan. gstack turns Claude Code into specialized workflow modes — founder brain, eng manager brain, paranoid reviewer brain, QA engineer brain. This repo ports those ideas to Kiro's steering file system.

License

MIT — same as the original gstack project.