Spec-Driven Dev Is Back. But Not How You Think • Daniel Terhorst-North & Gojko Adzic

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.
https://gotopia.tech

Daniel Terhorst-North - Originator of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) & Principal at Dan North & Associates
Gojko Adzic - Software Delivery Consultant & Author of "Lizard Optimization" and many more Books

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/441

RESOURCES
Daniel
https://bsky.app/profile/tastapod.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tastapod
https://github.com/tastapod
https://mastodon.social/@tastapod
http://dannorth.net/blog

Gojko
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gojko
https://github.com/gojko
https://twitter.com/gojkoadzic
https://gojko.net

DESCRIPTION
Gojko Adzic and Daniel Terhorst-North tackle the question every software team is wrestling with right now: does AI-assisted development actually work, and if so, how?
Their verdict is nuanced. One-shot "spec-to-product" approaches are doomed — both compare them to CASE tools and model-driven architecture of past decades, great for selling to enterprise buyers, disappointing in practice. What does work is tight, iterative feedback loops where AI handles the more deterministic, structural parts of the job while humans retain ownership of domain knowledge, semantic correctness, and architectural judgment.

The most practically useful thread of the conversation is Gojko's insight on guardrails: instead of relying on markdown files and hoping your AI agent stays in line, encode your rules as real, automated linting checks — ones that run in CI, apply to humans and bots alike, and include actionable error messages.
Daniel adds a complementary observation: AI shines brightest not on core domain code, but on the "quality of life" tasks that never quite make it to the backlog. Their shared conclusion is that the teams winning with AI right now are the ones treating published frameworks as starting templates to rapidly adapt — not gospel to follow blindly.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Gojko Adzic • Lizard Optimization • https://leanpub.com/lizardoptimization
Gojko Adzic • Impact Mapping • https://amzn.to/3dQFCOq
Adzic, Evans & Roden • Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests • https://amzn.to/3yuDaoL
Adzic, Evans & Korac • Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories • https://amzn.to/3jQ4QjP
Adzic & Korac • Humans vs Computers • https://amzn.to/2Utz55A
Gojko Adzic • Specification by Example • https://amzn.to/3hHrEjb
Eliyahu M. Goldratt • Beyond the Goal • https://amzn.to/3wDbAL1
Kent Beck, Fowler, John, William, Don & Gamma • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3SFBYbN

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