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 <a class= "_ymio1r31 _ypr0glyw _zcxs1o36 _mizu194a _1ah3dkaa _ra3xnqa1 _128mdkaa _1cvmnqa1 _4davt94y _4bfu1r31 _1hms8stv _ajmmnqa1 _vchhusvi _kqswh2mm _ect4ttxp _syaz13af _1a3b1r31 _4fpr8stv _5goinqa1 _f8pj13af _9oik1r31 _1bnxglyw _jf4cnqa1 _30l313af _1nrm1r31 _c2waglyw _1iohnqa1 _9h8h12zz _10531ra0 _1ien1ra0 _n0fx1ra0 _1vhv17z1" title="https://www.computer.org/" href="https://www.computer.org/" data-renderer-mark="true" data-is-router-link="false" data-testid= "link-with-safety">IEEE Computer Society</a> and <a class="_ymio1r31 _ypr0glyw _zcxs1o36 _mizu194a _1ah3dkaa _ra3xnqa1 _128mdkaa _1cvmnqa1 _4davt94y _4bfu1r31 _1hms8stv _ajmmnqa1 _vchhusvi _kqswh2mm _ect4ttxp _syaz13af _1a3b1r31 _4fpr8stv _5goinqa1 _f8pj13af _9oik1r31 _1bnxglyw _jf4cnqa1 _30l313af _1nrm1r31 _c2waglyw _1iohnqa1 _9h8h12zz _10531ra0 _1ien1ra0 _n0fx1ra0 _1vhv17z1" title="https://www.computer.org/software" href= "https://www.computer.org/software" data-renderer-mark="true" data-is-router-link="false" data-testid="link-with-safety">IEEE Software magazine</a>.

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