Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers SE Radio 710: Marc Brooker on Spec-Driven AI Dev
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Mar 4, 2026 Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, brings decades of software engineering and AI-assisted development expertise. He explores specification-driven development as an alternative to prompt-by-prompt coding. Short segments cover using specs to drive code and tests, agentic toolsets like Kiro, managing context for AI agents, and how roles shift toward design, validation, and long-term maintainability.
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Make The Specification The Source Of Truth
- Write a crisp, living specification that defines success and use it to drive code generation and tests.
- Brooker recommends iterating the spec as you build, adding mocks or snippets, and using it to generate property-based tests.
Aurora Driver Built With Property Based Tests
- AWS used spec-driven development to build a Java driver for Aurora D-SQL and derived properties like "every connection attempt contains an authorization token."
- They generated property-based tests to fuzz many API permutations and assert that property across thousands of cases.
Use AI For Drafts But Humans Decide Design
- Use AI to draft specs and designs but keep humans in the loop to choose architecture and validate intent.
- Brooker outlines steps: define customer/problem, write/iterate spec, choose design and languages, then generate code and tests with agents.