Write the Spec, Let the Agents Build: A Practical Playbook

In this episode of New Breakpoint, Arnauld Lheureux joins host Michelle Sandford for a hands-on guide to shipping with confidence in an agent powered world.

The core idea is simple: treat the spec as the product, and let agents do the heavy lifting, as long as you give them the right constraints.

Arnauld walks through what makes a spec implementable:
• Clear outcomes
• Non-goals
• Edge cases
• Acceptance criteria
• The smallest testable slice

From there, we unpack how to translate that spec into high quality agent tasks for implementation, tests, refactors, and documentation, while keeping humans in control of intent and tradeoffs.

You will learn practical prompting patterns, review checkpoints, and how to avoid the common failure modes like scope creep, plausible but wrong code, and inconsistent behavior across environments.

We close with an enterprise lens: how teams use GitHub Enterprise to operationalize this approach with governance, security boundaries, and a growing ecosystem of custom and third-party agents.

If you want a repeatable playbook that turns specs into merged pull requests with less toil and fewer surprises, this is the episode.