How spec-driven development is changing the rules | AWS’ Amit Patel

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:09)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:11)
This week, I'm sitting down with Amit Patel, Director of Software Development for Kiro at AWS. And we dive into how his team, operating like a startup inside of Amazon, created a new agentic IDE called Kiro that uses spec-based development to create persistent structured plans. This approach keeps context alive between sessions and your teammates, and fills in a crucial part of the agentic handoff. Amit shares how his team used the tool to build itself, and all by creating the space for engineers to do their best work. But before we dive into it, in this week's news, we're covering a few topics, including something that came across our desk about AI being in its dial-up era, engineering managers who are paralyzed by fear and how they act out. A hack that someone did for their Wi-Fi connected robot vacuum, that was just too good to read. So we're going to cover all of this stuff, and Ben, I think, let's start at the top.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:07)
Yeah, so I wanted to cover this story on AI's dial-up era. So this comes from substack user Nowfall. And look, Andrew, it's 1995 all over again. You know, the AI boom feels like the early internet, like full of hype, destined for a bunch of shake-ups. But all the while along, we're building these foundations for what the future is going to look like. So back in 1995, like, let's all think back 30 years. The internet had just started to go mainstream. Many of us were just starting to get connected to it and imagining the possibilities that it would bring to us. And looking back 30 years on, in a way, both the optimists and the pessimists were right about many things over the years. But ultimately, it was incredibly hard to imagine what life would have looked like here in 2025 if you were sitting there back in 1995, just getting connected to the internet. Let's just think about the fact that the internet search or the internet giants now started as a search engine and an online bookstore. Would you have imagined that those would be the titans 30 years later?

**Andrew Zigler** (2:16)
Truly.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:17)
And this article brought up everyone's favorite philosophical concept in 2025, and that's Jevon's paradox. But approach it in a way that I think is nuanced, in a way that not a lot of people have covered this paradox. And that is that more supply, yes, it can lead to more demand. Like if you build more efficient steam engines, you may just increase demand for steam engines. But there's a limit to that, actually. And many industries, they grow in demand for a while, but then productivity and demand for that service or that object reach some sort of equilibrium that sort of causes employment to drop over the long term. And we're all navigating this space of AI with its excessive hype, its inflated valuations, these inevitable failures that are certainly around the corner. But there's a lot of infrastructure that's being built in this space right now that will outlive a lot of that hype and bubble popping. I feel as often that we're at the peak of it right now, especially with what we're hearing around open AI coming out. And they've got 1.4 trillion in spending obligations over the next few years and off revenue of less than 2 billion revenue per month. Do the math on how long it's going to take them to pay for that without extreme growth.
But I've seen a lot of these parallels between the internet bubble popping and how it gave us all this inexpensive infrastructure that was then used by all the Web 2 companies to sort of build the next generation of the Web. And this article really just sort of makes the point that we can predict change, but it's really challenging to know the specifics of that change. Very few in 1995 foresaw dating apps or Uber or influencers being a career option. And similarly, AI is going to unlock a lot of new domains and job categories yet that we just don't really have a concept of because they haven't been invented. And a great example is there's a lot of job transformation that happens during these sorts of changes. Journalism as a function has expanded over the Internet era, but the journalist job has declined all along the way. Just as a great example, I would say you and I, Andrew, we are certainly not journalists, but we do engage in a lot of acts of journalism, as do many professionals in our space. But I wanted to cover this, because this is one of the best articles that I have read in quite a while about the state of the AI industry, and it really closely matches my own perception on where everything stands. And I just love the closing line. Our AI future is loading. Like we're all still determining that today.