Spec-driven development: The AI engineering workflow at Notion | Ryan Nystrom

One line that I've been putting in my prompts lately is I literally don't know what I'm doing here. You gotta explain it like I'm a five year old. I didn't start with writing code. I didn't start with anything. I just started with an empty markdown document. I actually just opened up whisper and just started yapping about how this feature should work. I gave the yap session to codex and was like, write a spec. I then opened up codex again, pointed it at this spec file, and I said build it. And basically one shotted this. I've been in software engineering for twenty plus years. We were writing these documents, and we were sitting in meetings with other engineers debating the merits of one implementation versus another. And now, no more waiting for the meeting. No more waiting for review. I'm not a CI expert, but I kinda know what I want. And so other folks were kind of like, can you just bring some of your, like, puppy dog energy to, like, CI and just see what we can do? Your AI your agent is never gonna complain when you ask it to do this five minutes before the meeting starts. It is more relaxing and it's more fun, and I feel like I'm getting more done. It's weird to have this, like, win win win. They do the triangle and they're like, pick two, and you're like, no. I wanna pick all three. Give me the whole triangle. Give me the whole triangle. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vow, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Ryan Nystrom from Notion, and he's gonna show us as an engineering manager how you can never prep for a stand up again. We're also gonna see how you can get a background agent to write code for a fix your friend texted you and how spec driven development really works in a code base of scale. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Work OS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your Copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chat bot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where Work OS comes in. Work OS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and …