The AI Native Dev - from Copilot today to AI Native Software Development tomorrow

Spec-driven development is reshaping what software engineers actually do all day, and Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, has read 3,000 to 4,000 postmortems that convinced him the code was never the hard part. In this episode of The AI Native Dev, Marc explains why testing and specification are now the real engineering work, why metastable failures keep taking down systems that look perfectly healthy, and why he still won't let AI write a single word of his blog.

What we cover:
– Why spec-driven development is turning testing into the hardest part of software
– What metastable failures are, and why they keep taking healthy-looking systems down
– How agentic coding tools can learn from postmortems and build their own memory
– Why classic authorization breaks down once you're writing agentic policy
– Why Marc won't let AI write his blog, but is fully comfortable with AI-generated code
– What it takes to bring junior engineers up to speed in an AI-native industry

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:17 - Marc Brooker: 18 years at AWS building agentic dev tools
00:04:36 - Inside Strands, AWS's open source agent SDK
00:06:44 - Fifteen years on call, and what agents still can't debug
00:11:23 - Metastable failures and the humility of 4,000 postmortems
00:14:32 - Teaching agents to learn from postmortems and build their own memory
00:20:14 - Why agentic policy needs more than classic authorization
00:32:14 - The agentic software development hypothesis: spec-driven development, oracles, and testing
00:39:56 - Why Marc won't let AI write his blog (but will let it write code)
00:46:37 - Advice for leveling up junior engineers in the AI era

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/[SLUG]

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Do you trust an agent to run its own on-call rotation yet? Tell us in the comments.

Coding agent reliability isn't a model problem, it's a gates problem. Ran Aroussi, creator of yfinance and founder of Automaze, argues that an "agentic workflow" is a contradiction in terms, and that the only thing standing between you and full autonomy is deciding where a human still signs off. He also thinks you stopped needing junior developers for their coding skills about a year ago, and that hiring them anyway is the only way the industry gets its next generation of architects.

What we cover:
– Why "agentic workflow" is a contradiction, and when agentic coding is the wrong tool for the job
– Where a human still has to sign off, and what coding agent reliability actually depends on
– What a software factory changed about delivery times, pricing and the client backlog
– Why you no longer need juniors for their coding skills, and why you should hire them anyway
– Teachable knowledge vs earned knowledge, and the experience agents cannot compress
– The law firm model: why dev agencies may end up looking more like Kirkland & Ellis than a SaaS startup

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:05 - yfinance, open source and 30 million downloads a month
00:06:03 - Automaze and the MUXI agent application server
00:10:42 - Where to draw the line on agent autonomy
00:15:12 - Software factories and fully autonomous merges
00:22:25 - The architect archetype and the four-phase ladder
00:28:11 - Teachable knowledge vs earned knowledge
00:30:14 - What agents did to delivery times and pricing
00:37:03 - Why "agentic workflow" is an oxymoron
00:41:08 - Anthropic, OpenClaw and the end of flat subscriptions

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/vut

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Where's your gate? Tell us in the comments where you still refuse to let a coding agent merge without a human looking.

The software factory that put up 850 pull requests in a week, with 85 to 90% of them handled by agents end to end. Tessl's Head of Product Dru Knox on how it actually got built, why it started with skills rather than automation, and the two things nobody expects a factory to change. Guy Podjarny digs into the skills-to-loops-to-factory path, and what breaks when you skip a step.

What we cover:
– What a software factory actually is, and how it differs from a pile of disconnected automations
– Loop engineering: turning a skill into something that gets better every time it runs
– Why context engineering has to come before automation, and what stalls when it doesn't
– The two gains nobody forecasts from extra agent capacity: quality and fungibility
– Verifiers and evals, or how you enforce a standard that agents are free to ignore
– Context-driven code review, and why a general-purpose reviewer plateaus

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:23 - Kikimora: Tessl's own dark factory
00:04:45 - Skills, loops and factories, defined
00:09:09 - 850 PRs a week, and the road to it
00:11:27 - The surprises: quality and fungibility
00:13:16 - Why a factory has to be context centric
00:16:40 - Context-driven code review and the wall teams hit
00:22:51 - Skills inventory across your whole code estate
00:28:38 - Verifiers, evals and enforcing what you wrote down
00:37:30 - Loops, automations and owning your software factory

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/coi

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If you've hit the plateau Dru describes, tell us where it stopped compounding for you.

Lada Kesseler's approach to loop engineering is brutally simple: give the agent one step, make it write the result to a file, then read it back and go again. She calls it a centrifuge. Spin fast enough and the stupid comes out.

The Logic20/20 principal engineer has spent the last year and a half building the ground rules, skills and refinement loops that fight the defaults coding agents ship with, starting with an instruction to stop trying to please her. Along the way she explains why she trusts AI-written tests less than AI-written code, why the description field in an agent skill was never meant for humans, and why most teams chasing a software factory are about to drown in garbage.

What we cover:
– Why agent ground rules have to give the model a mission to disagree with you
– The refinement loop that gets to quality when the first attempt never does
– Why an agent harness only works if it does one thing at a time
– Sketch prototypes: replacing your code with a markdown file and an agent
– Why AI-generated tests are more dangerous than AI-generated code
– Software factories, and what happens when you try to switch into one overnight

*AI DevCon is coming back to New York this November*
Get 15% off your ticket with code POD15
https://tessl.io/devcon#tickets

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:38 - Using AI for everything, not just code
00:06:15 - Ground rules: fixing the defaults agents ship with
00:10:02 - Agent skills and why the description isn't for humans
00:13:09 - Loop engineering: how you actually get to quality
00:16:03 - The biggest misconception about coding agents
00:20:43 - Sketch prototypes and the limits of AI architecture
00:27:48 - Reverse direction: you are the decider
00:31:58 - Why she trusts AI tests less than AI code
00:35:00 - Software factories, or drowning in garbage

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/k2t

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Where are you on the loop engineering curve, still hoping for a good first try or already spinning? Tell us in the comments.

Turning every repo into a software factory sounds like marketing until you see the machinery underneath. Don Syme, Principal Researcher at GitHub, breaks down continuous AI and GitHub Agentic Workflows, now in public preview. The short version: the agents are the easy part, the quality gates and guardrails are the work.

Watch Don's AI DevCon Talk here: https://youtu.be/kbvqRWY-bUs

What we cover:
– What continuous AI is, and why it sits beside CI/CD rather than inside it
– Why bounding the context is what stops automated agents going off the rails
– Whether the repo is really the right unit for a software factory, and where monorepos break it
– One workflow or an agent zoo? Cost control, scheduling and model exams
– Quality gates, human review, and equipping the reviewer instead of drowning them

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:52 - What is continuous AI?
00:07:33 - From single player to multiplayer automation
00:09:42 - Bounding the context so agents don't go off the rails
00:12:57 - Software factories, loops and harnesses
00:18:44 - Inside GitHub Agentic Workflows
00:25:19 - Why the repo became the unit of production
00:37:11 - What belongs in the repo, and what doesn't
00:45:07 - One workflow or an agent zoo? Cost control in the factory
00:52:01 - Quality gates, human review and equipping the reviewer

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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If you're building a software factory of your own, tell us in the comments where your bottleneck actually sits.