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

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

Author: SE-Radio Team March 5, 2026 Duration: 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.

For developers who think deeply about their craft, Software Engineering Radio-The Podcast for Professional Software Developers offers a steady, thoughtful conversation about building software. This isn't about chasing headlines or quick tips; it's a deliberate exploration of the principles, patterns, and hard-won insights that define lasting work in the field. The SE-Radio Team creates each episode as original, standalone content, ensuring you get focused depth rather than recycled conference talks. Every ten days, a new installment arrives, alternating between detailed tutorial-style deep dives on specific technologies or methodologies and candid interviews with influential voices and practitioners from across the industry. Tuning in means joining a continuous learning journey where complex topics are broken down with clarity, from system architecture and language design to team dynamics and career development. This podcast serves as a reliable educational archive, a resource you can return to as your experience grows, always anchored in the realities and challenges faced by professional developers every day.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Podcast Episodes
SE Radio 686: François Daoust on W3C [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:36
François Daoust, W3C staff member and co-chair of the Web Developer Experience Community Group, discusses the origins of the W3C, the browser standardization process, and how it relates to other organizations like TC39,…
SE Radio 685: Will Wilson on Deterministic Simulation Testing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:14
In this episode, Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Antithesis, explores Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) with host Sriram Panyam. Wilson was part of the pioneering team at FoundationDB that developed this revoluti…
SE Radio 679: Wesley Beary on API Design [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:51
Wesley Beary of Anchor speaks with host Sam Taggart about designing APIs with a particular emphasis on user experience. Wesley discusses what it means to be an "API connoisseur"— paying attention to what makes the APIs w…
SE Radio 678: Chris Love on Kubernetes Security [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:36
Chris Love, co-author of the book Core Kubernetes, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about kubernetes security. Chris identifies the node layer, secrets management, the network layer, contains, and pods as the…