Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

SE Radio 710: Marc Brooker on Spec-Driven AI Dev

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 IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

SE Radio 709: Bryan Cantrill on the Data Center Control Plane

Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about challenges in deploying hardware on-premises at scale. They discuss the difficulty of building up Samsung data centers with off-the-shelf hardware, how vendors silently replace components that cause performance problems, and why AWS and Google build their own hardware. Bryan describes the security vulnerabilities and poor practices built into many baseboard management controllers, the purpose of a control plane, and his experiences building one in NodeJS while struggling with the runtime's future during his time at Joyent. He explains why Oxide chose to use Rust for its control plane and the OpenSolaris-based Illumos as the operating system for their vertically integrated rack-scale hardware, which is designed to help address a number of these key challenges. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

SE Radio 708: Jens Gustedt on C in 2026

Jens Gustedt, author of Modern C, senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA), deputy director of the ICube lab, and former co-editor of the ISO C standard, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about the past 5 years in C, C2Y, and C23. They discuss what has happened in the C world since we last spoke 5 years ago, including how the latest C standard is going and what to expect. Jens discusses how the latest changes in the Modern C book apply to you, how a C transition header can help you get up to C23 if you're not there already, and presents a comprehensive approach for program failure. This episode explores C2Y, C23, bit-precise types, stdckdint.h, stdbit.h, 128 bit types, enumeration types, nullptr, Syntactic annotations, auto and typeof keywords, if let, as well as what's being added and removed in C2Y (possibly called "C28"), and Gustedt's four categories of program failure. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

SE Radio 707: Subhajit Paul on ERP Automation and AI

In this episode, Subhajit Paul joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems work in practice and where machine learning and generative AI are beginning to fit into real-world ERP environments. Subhajit grounds the conversation in ERP fundamentals, explaining core business flows such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and plan-to-produce, and why ERP systems are central to running large enterprises. He then walks through the realities of ERP implementation, sharing examples of both successful and failed projects and highlighting common challenges around testing, process coverage, integrations, and change management. The discussion also explores how AI is being applied in ERP today, including practical ML use cases such as inventory optimization and anomaly detection, as well as emerging generative AI and agent-based approaches. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

SE Radio 706: Yechezkel "Chez" Rabinovich on Observability Tool Migration Techniques

Yechezkel "Chez" Rabinovich, CTO and co-founder at Groundcover, joins SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath to discuss the key challenges in migrating observability toolsets. The episode starts with a look at why customers might seek to migrate their existing Observability stack, and then Chez explains some approaches and techniques for doing so. The discussion turns to OpenTelemetry, including what it is and how Groundcover helps with the migration of dashboards, monitors, pipelines, and integrations that are proprietary to vendor products. Chez describes methods for validating a successful migration, as well as metrics and signals that engineering teams can use to assess the migration health. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.