The agentic era of software engineering began almost a year ago. And while much has changed in 2026, there's still a lot that hasn't been settled. One of the most important issues is how teams should collaborate. The idea of working with a spec may have considerable allure, but many questions remain: How should it be defined? Who owns it? How do we iterate with it? The fear of retreating back into waterfall is very real and requires vigilance.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Caer Sanders are joined by former Thoughtworkers Cassie Shum (now VP of Ecosystem and Product Engineering at RelationalAI) and Tim Cochran (recently at AWS and now CTO at Praxa Inc) to discuss how we need to rethink the way we collaborate and structure our work in a world of AI agents. Cassie and Tim have been grappling with these issues in their own work this year, and have both been thinking through how the industry can help developers successfully leverage agents while retaining the necessary autonomy to deliver quality software.
Listen to this conversation for grounded perspectives on spec-driven development and agentic software engineering.