Reverse Engineering Existing Code into Specs

Spec-Driven Development works great when you start a new project. You write the specs first, and the AI agent implements them. But most of us don’t work on new projects. We work on systems that are five, ten or twenty years old. Often there are no specs at all, or the specs are outdated.

From Prompt Template to Skill: The IREB AI4RE Prompt Guide

“Write user stories for an ordering portal.” Most requirements prompts look like this. The answer looks plausible, reads well, and nobody can say whether it is good. The next person asks the same thing in different words and gets a different answer. That is not requirements engineering. That is a chat.

Hooks That Stop the Agent From Claiming “Done”

An AI agent that says “done” is making a claim. Claude Code hooks let the session ask for proof: a Stop hook that wants a fresh, green test report, and a status guard that wants a coverage audit before a use case is marked as done.

Back to the 90s: The Software Engineer Has All the Roles Again

When I started as a software engineer in the 1990s, I programmed COBOL on the IBM mainframe. Later, client/server applications came along. Many things were simpler back then. Not the technology, but the organization. I talked to the customers, gathered the requirements, did the architecture and the design, wrote the code, and made sure the [...]

Harness Engineering: Why a Minimal CLAUDE.md and a Good Architecture Document Belong Together

The term Harness Engineering has established itself in recent months. The formula behind it is simple: Agent = Model + Harness. The harness is everything that makes up an AI agent, except the model itself. That includes instruction files like CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, skills, tools, tests, linters, hooks and CI gates.

The INNOQ SCS Primer and My View on Self-contained Systems

INNOQ published a primer on Self-contained Systems in August 2026, written by Johannes Seitz. I read it with one question in mind: Does it match what I say in my talks and in my Java Magazin article?

Shift Left Needs Artifacts, Not Just Conversations

Rachel Laycock wrote a post called Maybe We Shouldn’t Be Reviewing All This Code. It is a response to Brian Houck, who worries that automating code review away will cost us everything else that review gives us: knowledge sharing, mentoring, collective ownership, architectural understanding. Her answer is simple and I agree with it. Why are we [...]

Agile Is Not Dead. The Agile Industry Might Be.

I keep hearing it lately: “Agile is dead because of AI.” At conferences, in customer meetings, on LinkedIn. The reasoning is usually the same: If an AI agent builds in two hours what a team used to build in two weeks, why do we still need sprints, standups, and retrospectives?

Why Vaadin Browserless Testing Is a Game Changer for AI Generated Web Applications

AI coding agents write code fast. The bottleneck is no longer typing, it is verification. How fast can the agent find out that the code it just wrote is correct? This is where testing speed and testing architecture suddenly matter more than ever.

The Three Levels of Spec-Driven Development, and Where the AI Unified Process Sits

Spec-driven development is a popular term at the moment. Everybody uses it, and everybody means something slightly different. Birgitta Böckeler from Thoughtworks wrote a helpful article on martinfowler.com where she looked at tools that call themselves spec-driven. Her main finding: spec-driven development is not one thing. There are three levels.

Code Is No Longer the Bottleneck. Requirements Are.

On August 21, 2026, Anthropic published The AI-Native SDLC Playbook. It is worth reading. It describes how the software development lifecycle changes when agents write most of the code. The core message: code is no longer the bottleneck. The bottlenecks now sit to the left and right of the build, in planning, review, testing, and deployment. [...]

A Paper from 1995 Describes How You Should Work with AI Agents

The paper is older than Java. And it answers a question everyone is asking in 2026: Who guards the architecture when AI agents write the code?