How I Built a Kiro Crew App in 5 Minutes - Full Tutorial With Code

Parts 1-4 showed you what Kiro Crew can do. Investigate incidents. Automate weekly toil. Block dangerous commands. All using the built-in agent. But here's what nobody's talking about: Kiro Crew has an App Store. And you can build your own apps for it. In five minutes. Not plugins. Not scripts. Full apps with their own agents, skills, cron jobs, and dashboard pages. Package them. Publish them. Other users install with one click. I built one. A Daily Standup Bot. It reads my git commits every morning and generates standup notes so I never have to write "worked on X" again. Let me show you how. Table of Contents - What the App Kit actually is - What we're building - Step 1: The manifest (app.json) - Step 2: The agent - Step 3: The skill - Step 4: The dashboard page - Step 5: The cron job - Install and run - What it looks like live - Publishing to the App Store - What else you could build - Try it yourself What the App Kit actually is An app is a package that contributes any combination of: | Component | What it does | |---|---| | Agents | Custom AI agent with its own model, prompt, and tool access | | Skills | On-demand knowledge files that teach the agent specific capabilities | | MCP servers | New tools the LLM can call | | Cron jobs | Scheduled tasks the app owns | | UI pages | Custom pages in the dashboard sidebar | | Backend processes | HTTP servers reverse-proxied through the gateway | An app that only ships a skill is one markdown file. An app that ships everything is a full project. You decide the scope. The key difference from "just adding a skill": apps are installable, versioned, publishable, and isolated. Crew manages their lifecycle. Users install from the App Store with one click. What we're building A Daily Standup Bot that: - Reads git commits from the last 24 hours - Formats them as "What I Did / What's Blocked / What's Next" - Runs every weekday at 9 AM automatically - Shows standup history in a custom dashboard page Five files. Five minutes. A real app you'd actually use. standup-bot/ ├── app.json ← manifest (identity + resources) ├── agents/ │ └── standup-agent.json ← agent definition ├── skills/ │ └── standup-format/ │ └── SKILL.md ← formatting rules └── ui/ └── src/App.tsx ← dashboard page Step 1: The manifest (app.json) Every app needs one file: app.json . This is the single source of truth. { "name": "standup-bot", "version": "1.0.0", "displayName": "Daily Standup Bot", "description": "Auto-generates standup notes from git commits.", "author": "sarvar_04", "agents": ["agents/standup-agent.json"], "skills": ["skills/standup-format"], "ui": { "entry": "dist/index.mjs", "pages": [{ "route": "/apps/standup-bot", "label": "Standups", "icon": "ClipboardList" }] }, "crons": [{ "name": "morning-standup", "cron_expr": "0 9 * * 1-5", "message": "Generate today's standup summary from yesterday's git activity", "agent": "standup-agent" }] } That's agents, skills, a dashboard page, and a cron job. All declared in one file. Crew reads this and wires everything up. Step 2: The agent agents/standup-agent.json : { "name": "standup-agent", "model": "auto", "description": "Generates standup summaries from git activity", "prompt": "You are a standup summary assistant. Analyze git commits from the last 24 hours and generate concise standup notes. Format: What I Did, What's Blocked, What's Next.", "tools": ["@kirocrew-core"] } Eight lines. The @kirocrew-core tool reference gives it access to spawn processes, read files, and interact with the system. The model: "auto" lets Crew pick the best available model. Step 3: The skill skills/standup-format/SKILL.md : --- name: standup-format description: How to format daily standup updates triggers: [standup, daily, summary, morning] always: false --- # Standup Format When generating standup notes: 1. What I did - List completed work from git commits (group by feature/fix) 2. What's blocked - Identify stale PRs, failing CI, unresolved issues 3. What's next - Infer from branch names and open issues Rules: - One line per bullet - Past tense for "did", present for "blocked", future for "next" - Group related commits into one bullet - Skip merge commits and dependency bumps - Flag anything unmerged for >24 hours Skills are markdown. They load on-demand when trigger words appear in the conversation. No code. No compilation. Just knowledge the agent uses when relevant. Step 4: The dashboard page ui/src/App.tsx : import { useAppApi, useAppEvents } from '@kirocrew/app-sdk' import { Card, CardTitle, PageHeader, StatCard, Badge } from '@kirocrew/app-sdk/ui' import { useState, useEffect } from 'react' export default function StandupDashboard() { const api = useAppApi() const [standups, setStandups] = useState([]) useEffect(() => { api.get('/api/apps/standup-bot/history').then(setStandups) }, []) return ( <> ) } You don't npm install @kirocrew/app-sdk . The dashboard provides it at runtime. Your app stays tiny. Build with Vite, mark Crew's SDK as external, output a single .mjs file. Step 5: The cron job Already declared in app.json : "crons": [{ "name": "morning-standup", "cron_expr": "0 9 * * 1-5", "message": "Generate today's standup summary from yesterday's git activity", "agent": "standup-agent" }] Crew registers the cron on enable. Deregisters on disable. Every weekday at 9 AM, it spawns a session, runs the message through standup-agent , and stores the result. No daemon. No systemd timer. Just a line in your manifest. Install and run # Get your auth token TOKEN=$(kirocrew token | grep -oP 'token=\K[^&]+') # Install (one command - point to your app directory) curl -s -X POST "http://localhost:5476/api/apps/install?token=$TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"source": "./standup-bot"}' | python3 -m json.tool # Enable - agents, skills, crons all activate curl -s -X POST "http://localhost:5476/api/apps/standup-bot/enable?token=$TOKEN" \ | python3 -m json.tool Response: { "ok": true, "name": "standup-bot", "message": "enabled standup-bot", "registration": { "agents": ["standup-bot/standup-agent"], "skills": ["standup-bot/standup-format"], "crons": ["standup-bot/morning-standup"], "mcp_servers": [], "errors": [] }, "hooks": { "crons_registered": ["standup-bot/morning-standup"] } } Agent registered. Skill loaded. Cron scheduled. Dashboard page live. Refresh the dashboard. "Standups" is now in your sidebar. That's it. What it looks like live After installation, "Standups" appears in the sidebar. The dashboard shows stat cards and an empty state waiting for the first standup. Trigger it manually in a chat session: Use the standup-agent to generate today's standup from ~/projects/payment-api. Run git log, analyze every commit, group by feature area. The agent runs git log --since="24 hours ago" --oneline --no-merges , analyzes each commit, and produces: What I Did: Payment Processing: - Implemented rate limiting middleware for /api/payments (max 100 req/min per API key) - Fixed currency conversion rounding bug - was truncating before conversion - Added retry logic for failed Stripe webhook deliveries (exponential backoff, max 5) API & Docs: - Updated OpenAPI spec with new error codes (429, 503, 504) - Added request validation for multi-currency checkout (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY) - Refactored payment intent creation to use idempotency keys Infrastructure: - Configured DynamoDB TTL for expired sessions (7-day retention) - Added CloudWatch alarms for payment failure rate > 5% What's Blocked: - PCI compliance security review - waiting on AppSec team (2 days) - Stripe Connect onboarding - blocked on legal approval What's Next: - Subscription billing with usage-based metering - Payment analytics dashboard (revenue, failure rates, top merchants) 11 commits analyzed. 9 seconds. Navigate to the Standups page - it's already there. Publishing to the App Store The App Store is a curated registry. Publishing means opening a PR: // In app-registry.json: { "name": "standup-bot", "gitUrl": "https://github.com/simplynadaf/kiro-crew-standup-bot", "branch": "main" } Once merged, your app shows up in Explore → Library for all Crew users. Search "standup" and there it is: Daily Standup Bot v1.0.0 · Enabled · Registry Auto-generates standup notes from git commits. Runs daily at 9 AM Mon-Fri. sarvar_04 1 agent · 1 skill · 1 cron · 1 page [Open] [Disable] [Sync] [Uninstall] Your app sits alongside the built-in ones - Code Review Sage, Research Lab, Task Runner. First-class citizen. Teams can also host private registries for internal apps that shouldn't be public. What else you could build The standup bot took 5 files and 5 minutes. Here's what's possible with the same pattern: | App idea | Components | |---|---| | PR Review Bot | Agent + skill (code review rules) + cron (check PRs hourly) | | Incident Postmortem Generator | Agent + skill (postmortem template) + UI (history page) | | Cost Anomaly Alerter | Agent + cron (daily AWS cost check) + Slack notification | | Onboarding Buddy | Agent + skill (team knowledge) + UI (progress tracker) | | Sprint Health Monitor | Agent + cron (daily Jira check) + UI (burndown chart) | Any workflow that's "check something + format it + deliver it on schedule" is a Crew app waiting to happen. Try it yourself Kiro Crew is open source (Apache 2.0). The standup-bot code is in this article. # Install Crew curl -fsSL https://download.crew.kiro.dev/cli.sh | sh kirocrew gateway # Enable third-party apps # In ~/.kiro/crew/config.json set: "apps_allow_third_party": true # Create the app mkdir -p standup-bot/agents standup-bot/skills/standup-format standup-bot/ui/src # Create the 5 files shown above (app.json, agent, skill, UI, vite config) # Build UI cd standup-bot/ui && npm install && npm run build && cd ../.. # Install + enable TOKEN=$(kirocrew token | grep -oP 'token=\K[^&]+') curl -s -X POST "http://localhost:5476/api/apps/install?token=$TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"source": "./standup-bot"}' curl -s -X POST "http://localhost:5476/api