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SE Radio 710: Marc Brooker on Spec-Driven AI Dev

SE Radio 710: Marc Brooker on Spec-Driven AI Dev

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers vor 5 Monaten

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1:03:27

Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at
AWS, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore specification-driven
development as a scalable alternative to prompt-by-prompt "vibe
coding" in AI-assisted software engineering. Marc explains how
accelerating code generation shifts the bottleneck to
requirements, design, testing, and validation, making explicit
specifications the central artifact for maintaining quality and
velocity over time. He describes how specifications can guide
both code generation and automated testing, including
property-based testing, enabling teams to catch regressions
earlier and reason about behavior without relying on line-by-line
code review.

The conversation examines how spec-driven development fits into
modern SDLC practices; how AI agents can support design, code
review, documentation, and testing; and why managing context is
now one of the hardest problems in agentic development. Marc
shares examples from AWS, including building drivers and cloud
services using this approach, and discusses the role of
modularity, APIs, and strong typing in making both humans and AI
more effective. The episode concludes with guidance on rollout,
evaluation metrics, cultural readiness, and why AI-driven
development shifts the engineer's role toward problem definition,
system design, and long-term maintainability rather than raw code
production.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE
Software magazine.