SE Radio 710: Marc Brooker on Spec-Driven AI Dev
From Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers by SE-Radio Team
March 4, 2026 · 1h 3m · Episode 710
About this episode
Marc Brooker discusses specification-driven development as a scalable alternative to traditional coding methods in AI-assisted software engineering.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Kanchan Shringi
Guest: Marc Brooker
Topics covered
- specification-driven development
- AI-assisted software engineering
- code generation
- automated testing
- software development lifecycle
- modularity
- context management
Keywords
- specifications
- code generation
- AI agents
- testing
- regressions
- software quality
- development practices
- modularity
- APIs
- long-term maintainability
Sponsors
IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Software
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: AWS
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