AI-assisted coding tools have made it easier than ever to spin up prototypes, but turning

those prototypes into reliable production-grade systems remains a major challenge.

Large language models are nondeterministic, prone to drift, and often lose track of intent

over long development sessions.

Kiro is an AI-powered IDEE that's built around a spec-driven development

workflow. It's focused on helping developers capture intent upfront, translated into concrete

requirements and designs, and systematically validate implementations through tasks, testing,

and guardrails. It aims to preserve the creativity of AI-assisted development

while producing software that is ready for real-world use. David Yanichek is a senior principal

engineer and a lead advisor on the Agentic AI team at AWS. Today, his work focuses on Kiro,

Frontier agents, Amazon Bedrock Agent Corps, and AWS's

operational agents. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the design of Kiro, how

spec-driven development changes the way teams work with AI coding agents, and what the next

generation of agentic software development might look like.

Kevin Ball, or K. Ball, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent

coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies,

founded the San Diego JavaScript meetupup and organizes the AI inaction

discussion group through latent space.

Check out the show notes to follow KBall on Twitter or LinkedIn or visit his website,

kball.l. LLC.

Thank you. David, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks.

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