Peers or Laborers? Notes from a Talk on Tech, Product, and What Nobody Said

A few nights ago I found myself in another one of those rooms. Same shape as the last one I wrote about: a circle of experienced people, a general topic and coffee and networking breaks. This time the subject was the relationship between tech and product teams; specifically, the friction in how they communicate, and why the two so often end up talking past each other. It’s a good topic. It’s also a trap. Everyone in a room like that has a war story, and war stories are easy to tell and very hard to learn from. So we told them. And somewhere between the third and fourth anecdote, I started noticing the things we weren’t saying - which, as usual, turned out to be the interesting part. ...

June 21, 2026 · 8 min · Kia Raad
Spec-driven development meets agentic coding: specs, instructions, and an AI assistant bridging idea to implementation.

When Specs Become the Interface: Notes from a Talk on Spec-Driven Development and Agentic Frameworks

Recently, more often than not my coding sessions involve AI agents in some capacity. Whether it’s GitHub Copilot suggesting snippets, or me creating an instructions file to guide the agent’s behavior, AI has become an important part of my workflow. And a couple of nights ago I caught myself doing something that would’ve sounded ridiculous just a year ago: I was “working” without writing code. Not in the I’m procrastinating way. In the I’m building the thing way. ...

December 23, 2025 · 7 min · Kia Raad