Hari Krishnan is back to talk about advancements in spec driven development, about advancements in open weights models, and about the book he's writing for Manning.

You can get the book for 50% off (and possibly save even more this week?) with the Manning Early Access program here: https://www.manning.com/books/spec-driven-development You get access to the first three chapters, and the full book once its ready.

Asoba’s CEO Shingai Samudzi is no stranger to ML, as a data scientist he’s put it to use throughout his career. Now, as Asoba looks to accelerate solar energy in South Africa, he’s assembling a new approach; combining a per inverter JEPA world model with Nahenda, a model they’ve developed based on Qwen fine-tuned specifically for epistemic behaviour.

Though this would be cool enough as an experiment, the early results are promising. On recent runs analyzing actual solar inverter data, they more accurately spotted problems (and ignored false positives) with equipment. In solar power, this improves margin, and can make or break a solar plant.

https://huggingface.co/asoba

More of Shingai’s research

More on SEP, Specification enhancement proposals

Rob is the CTO at Circle CI, and I was really interested to hear what all he can see from their vantage point - and it didn’t disappoint. He had lots of broad ranging insights in to what teams are doing all over the capability map; median to P90, how they’re different and what’s working.

A super insightful conversation! And he’s also just got a great energy, super fun conversation.

Key Topics

• AI’s impact on software development and testing
• Organizational adaptation to rapid change with AI
• Tools and mental models for AI-driven coding
• Revising requirements and workflows in the AI era
• Merge efficiency and reducing friction in CI/CD pipelines
• The role of agents and prompts in software engineering
• Organizational hiring and contribution patterns in AI-driven environments Impact of AI on software testing and debugging
• Shift towards product thinking and distributed decision-making
• The role of tooling and automation in quality assurance
• Changing team structures and roles in software organizations
• Strategies for managing system complexity and incident response

As usual, thanks to Navalia our founding sponsor!

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to deciding what will be next, I have interviews ready from so many super interesting guests that I can’t decide who will be next yet:

• Maybe Pete Hodgson; our second ever guest, super insightful and in a new role where he’s seeing even more, back to talk about what he’s been up to
• Or Shingai Samudzi, CEO and Founder of Asoba about how they’re using JEPA world models to improve solar in Africa
• or Ian Johnson, author of https://leanpub.com/harness-engineering who has been building agent factories at Parento?

Plus, I have even more interviews scheduled! It’s been a great summer and its looking like it will be a fantastic fall on Engineering With AI.

Chris Ford is one of my favourite speakers, curators, and writers on AI. His first episode on our show was a big hit, the most downloaded on most platforms. So when I heard he was writing a book, I had to have him back!

Check out the book:

Agentic Engineering at Scale

You may know Birgitta from her articles on MartinFowler.com, or from her own space at birgitta.info. She’s been in the role of Distinguished Engineer for assisted Software Delivery for the last three of her nearly fourteen years at ThoughtWorks.

- In “Understanding Spec-Driven-Development” she described “Spec-first”, “Spec-anchored” and “Spec-as-source”, using Kiro, spec-kit and Tessl to explore the concepts

- In “Harness engineering for coding agent users” she starts with some fundamental concepts, how we “feed-forward” using guides, and use sensors for feedback; and then she goes deep, covering harness engineering thoroughly

The first person to tell me she was doing interesting stuff was Pete Hodgson, our 2nd ever guest - so I’ve been working on getting her to come on the show since December of 2025. It was worth the wait!

Mentions and links:

Ivette Ordog https://ivettordog.com/

https://lexler.github.io/augmented-coding-patterns/patterns/approved-scenarios/

AI assisted legacy modernisation : From UX to code — XConf India 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV0bfPd9chw

https://swamp-club.com/

Jonas Claesson is a Principal Engineer at Provision Analytics. He’s the toolsmith and chief agent herder for a team of six developers with product managers and UX designers to help. He’s building tools his team uses every day; QA bots that use exploratory testing approaches for each story, commands that automatically compare SQL queries when they change, and generally keeping tech debt minimal.

Check out his LinkedIn feed, its been good reading!

We have some really amazing episodes planned, and some that we are working to schedule! However, the next episode may not come out on the normal cadence.

As always, special thanks to our founding sponsor, Navalia!

Ahmed is an independent consultant and AI researcher, and he has some really spicy takes! We had a really fun interview.

- AI finally makes "Classic" QA viable

- Maybe Anthropic's Mythos .... is a myth?

More on Ahmed at https://tekcaffe.com/

Hari Krishnan writes about Gen AI adoption at intent-driven.dev and walks us through Open Spec, a "spec anchored" framework he is an advisor to.

Things we talked about

• Hari's article at InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/articles/enterprise-spec-driven-development/
• Birgitta Böckeler’s article "Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl": https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-tools.html
• Lost in the Middle: https://cs.stanford.edu/~nfliu/papers/lost-in-the-middle.arxiv2023.pdf
• Tessl: https://docs.tessl.io/use/spec-driven-development-with-tessl

In this special episode of Engineering With AI we talk to Hany Elemary and Ibrahim Taha, co-founders, and Alina Murphy, Executive Program Manager about how AI is changing things for the businesses they serve.

https://navalia.io

https://engwith.ai

Guruprasad Venkatesh is Co-founder and Chief Architect for Beskar Technologies (beskar.tech), a custom software delivery company in Bangalore India that practices extreme programming (TDD, CI/CD, agile etc) and has taken steps to adopt AI to move even faster. He walks me through how he and Beskar are adopting AI, and about Baid, their own AI AI tool suite called Baid (https://baid.dev/bot)

As usual, special thanks to our sponsor, Navalia (https://navalia.io)!