In this episode, host Jonathan "J." Tower sat down with John Waters, fellow partner and founder at Trailhead, to talk about how AI changes every phase of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Rather than rehashing vibe coding, J. and John walk the full SDLC, including requirements and discovery, design and architecture, implementation, code review, testing and QA, DevOps and deployment, and long-term support. They dig into where AI has helped Trailhead deliver real leverage and where human judgment is still essential.

If you're trying to figure out where AI actually fits in real software delivery, besides AI-assisted development, this episode is for you.

Guest Bio:

John Waters is a Partner and co-founder at Trailhead Technology Partners. A longtime software architect and engineering leader, he's been driving Trailhead's effort to apply AI across the entire software development lifecycle—from discovery and estimation through architecture, implementation, QA, DevOps, and support. This marks his fourth appearance on Blue Blazes, making him the podcast's most frequent guest.

Additional Resources:

• Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code

• CodeRabbit (agentic code review): https://www.coderabbit.ai

• Terraform: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform

• Context7 (up-to-date library/SDK docs for AI): https://context7.com

• Playwright (end-to-end testing): https://playwright.dev

• Figma: https://www.figma.com

• Andrej Karpathy on building knowledge bases / LLM context: https://karpathy.ai

• Trailhead Technology Partners: https://trailheadtechnology.com