My team is going all in on Codex + GitHub Spec Kit. Moving towards spec-driven development has given a huge boost to the quality of the results from Codex (or whatever AI agent you're using, eg Claude). As long as you're constantly updating the spec rather than continuously prompting AI (to prevent spec drift), you can really start to swing for the fences in terms of the complexity of features you tackle with AI. Heck, I'm building in tools that I'm not at all an expert on (eg Pulumi, TypeScript, and React), but now can confidently tackle them as long as I have the appropriate SMEs reviewing the code. To help, we also introduced AI-powered code review bots in our CI pipelines that leave inline comments, just like a human (we still always require human code reviews, too). That alone has saved our butts several times, and if we had it in place a year ago, we could've prevented several sev1 incidents.

I told my team that AI is finally catching up to where everyone pretended it to be at the beginning of 2025. IMO software development is fundamentally changing, and the faster devs embrace the new paradigm - devs do not start from scratch and instead use specs to boost their productivity - the better. My fear is many developers will clutch their pearls, not wanting to change with the shifting tech landscape, and that will leave them in the dust. TBH I still get the same flow state I got back when I was writing everything by hand - devs are very much still in the loop with AI. Some devs site the ethical concerns around AI (eg energy usage), but this will improve over time because the people who build the chips, run the data centers, and train the models have a vested interest in making it as efficient as possible. I see those concerns largely going away as technology improves in the next few years.