It depends on your requirements, for basic development setup, you just need modern computer with installed Docker, k3d that runs in Docker containers and Tilt t

It depends on your requirements, for basic development setup, you just need modern computer with installed Docker, k3d that runs in Docker containers and Tilt to build/deploy your docker image to local k3d docker registry and little k8s configuration. You can just use basic concepts, so if all you need is container that exposes your application, you can just prepare Dockerfile, Tiltfile and k8s yaml file with deployment, service (LB) and use Tilt to automatically apply it to cluster, when you make any source code changes. Do you need to run some script once or periodically? Single k8s yaml file with Job/CronJob might be enough. Often that's all that is needed, but maybe you need to additionally provide some env variables, use some secret values, create/mount volume to your container or deploy supporting infrastructure (databases/messages queues/authentication server/ci/cd/monitoring/tracing/alerting) or get into advanced use cases like chaos engineering, service mesh, serverless, workflow engine (CI/ML). Kubernetes requires knowledge and experience to use all of its features and ecosystem, but you don't need to know it all from the start at expert level. However you need to actually learn Kubernetes, if you want to scale your solution, because eventually more people/teams might get involved, need for cooperation increases and non-functional requirements become more important and that's when you really start to appreciate Kubernetes.