Engineering with AI
"Engineering with AI" is a conversation with tech leaders about what their teams are doing, what coding tools they're adopting and how- in tiny startups, in bigger teams, and in large enterprises on their digital journey, and in digital native scale-ups. We're focusing on how things are different now; what "best practices" and cultural touchstones are holding up well, and which ones are changing. How do we staff teams differently now? How do we mentor? What processes are missing; which are feeling less worthwhile?
Episodes
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 imp...
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:
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 ...
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 fe...
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 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.
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)
"Human in the loop won't work"!
"Developers passing on tribal code base knowledge is over!"
"Pair Programming still matters!"
"Refactoring is not dead!"
"We should stop calling things CD!"
Wait, that last one is quite reasonable. (Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Design, Compact Disc, Certificate of Deposit...)
This was a really great conversation! Chris has been thinking hard about the impacts AI is having on soft...
Tim Cochran, Principal for Amazon Software Builder Experience, is no stranger to software development; in enterprise, scaleups and in startups. He’s well known for articles like Maximizing Developer Effectiveness, Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans, which focus on in developer experience, and Bottlenecks of Scaleups, a wide ranging series that focused on the challenges startups have as they scale up to become larger ...
Sharan Karanth is Principal Engineer and Head of Engineering at Binaxity, an "Invest now pay later" startup in Toronto. He talks us through how their team is using AI; what guardrails they have in place (human guardrails in this case!), how their engineering process works. Sharan went fairly deep in to the process, you can tell he's definitely still coding at Binaxity.
More on Binaxity: https://www.binaxity.com/
Cassie was just back from a week in Utah with Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Tim Cochran (next week's guest!) and too many cool people to list when we spoke. We covered everything from why it feels like we're testing all the time now, to an exploration of how "maybe refactoring is dead?"
For more on what RelationalAI is doing with knowledge graphs, check out https://relational.ai
As always, big thanks to our Founding Sponsor, Navalia.io!
John Jarosz is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Sightglass Partners, a product and technology studio that helps ambitious companies identify and create solutions that fulfil unmet needs.
We talked about how Sightglass uses GenAI through market entry analysis, product design and how the tools help his business and his customers.
This sounds like a silly click bait joke, and it kind of is. It’s also just how Aravindh works - ever since I’ve known him (close to 20 years at this point) he’s had this intense work habit. I admire how he does it; he knows not to get too far ahead of his team mates, for instance - so me might spend 20 hours learning something new for fun, 20 hours on a side project (like the algorithmic trading bot he built), an...
Philip Sears is the GenAI Enablement Lead at Grainger, where he helps engineering teams integrate AI tools across the software development lifecycle through strategy, evaluation, and hands-on learning.
In this episode, he talks about how Grainger rolls out AI using a four-phase adoption model, measuring AI value beyond raw developer speed and how it’s beneficial across the SDLC at enterprise.
As always, special thanks to our fo...
As an early devotee of Test Driven Development, Jeff Langr is the author of Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit, Modern C++ Programming with Test-Driven Development, and co-author of Clean Code.
Jeff is currently leading a team at Jack in the Box, and his team loves the mob code sessions he leads.
If you want to follow Jeff about his AADV technique, check out his Substack.
As always, special thanks t...
Our second interview, Pete Hodgson is an independent software delivery consultant in the San Francisco area. Pete has used a number of different approaches to AI as part of his workflow, and often helps teams get to the next level when working with AI as part of his consulting practice.
It's a great conversation, he comes up with quite a few ideas on how to ease context management through automation, scripting, and providing context...
Ahmad Nassri sees a lot of promise in LLM based coding models, and talks us through the techniques, tools and approaches he takes personally, and that he sees teams taking when working with AI tools today.
Our first, in person interview on Engineering With AI, Ahmad is the CTO of Socket (socket.dev), a leader in Software Composition Analysis tooling.
As always, special thanks to our foun...
A quick note for Engineering With AI subscribers!
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