Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Coder Radio. Today I'm speaking with Jamie Taylor, who is, of course, the host of the Modern.net podcast, among other things, a pretty big .net guy, loves some Cs that are sharp. It's a great conversation. We kind of jump around. It's less .net focused than you think.
a lot on SpecKit, which is something I was very unaware of, but has been released by GitHub as part of their, frankly, large and somewhat confusing array of developer tools powered by AI. Yeah, it's a great chat.
Chapter 2: What is the main focus of Jamie Taylor's work?
We also accidentally kind of stumble upon, I think it's called Moltbot now, but it was called the Clawbot when we recorded it. which subsequently in the like 48, 72 hours since the recording has just blown up all over Twitter and Reddit. It's the, you know, host it yourself AI. It's pretty cool.
I'm actually going to be doing a tutorial on getting that set up on a home Linux server, possibly a Mac mini. So fun stuff to look forward to. Little bit of housekeeping. So the Discord server, always check it out. We're adding some policies there because we're, as things are growing, we seem to have gotten the attention of a little bit of like
recruiter or what looks like dev shop spam of people uh basically soliciting contracting work in the gen channel so we basically me decided that i added a looking for work channel so if you're like a legitimate community member and you're between contracts or something like that you can totally post in there but if um you know if you sign up for the discord today and your first thing is very much a solicitation you will probably have that message deleted and possibly get banned
So trying to balance it out. Obviously, we don't want any false positives. Joining the server and doing an intro in Gen is totally fine. It's obviously, you know, come please hire me. The Gen chat is not the appropriate place for that. Having said that, the Looking for Work channel is, and that was newly created.
Chapter 3: How does SpecKit enhance AI-driven development?
It's been up for about a week, and it's totally fine to... I mean, we have folks doing CV slash resume critiques and suggestions on maybe cleaning up GitHub profiles, things like that. So trying to kind of balance the equities here, right? Obviously, there's a lot of turmoil in the industry right now. Folks are indeed looking for work. But Gen Chat really is supposed to be just a Gen Chat.
And I know a few of the... Especially a few of the most active Discorders have complained, which is why we made this change. So great. Also, swag is on the way. I was hoping to see proofs this week. Looks like it didn't happen. Probably next week. Certainly should be up by the end of February. And we're going to do a couple competitions to actually, you know, win free swag.
So we'll go from there.
Chapter 4: What is Moltbot and how has it gained popularity?
all right as always check out alice.dev if you need any data work or development work done and uh here's the show all right i've got jamie taylor of the modern.net podcast and i believe a microsoft mvp am i correct
That is correct. That is correct, Michael. Thank you ever so much for having me. I just want to say real quick before we do anything. First time, long time, right? I've been listening to the show since the beginning. Well, maybe not the beginning, beginning, but like all the way back when it was, you know, Jupiter broadcasting and stuff. So big fan of you, big fan of the show as well.
Awesome, I appreciate it. But I was listening to your show when it was called the, I believe, .NET Core podcast. Ah, thank you very much. Back in the ancient times, right?
Yeah, in the before times.
I understand you're here to take me to school today. We were chatting in the Discord, which folks, you should join the Discord, about something called SpecKit, which went right over my head. So what the hell is that?
Yeah, so first thing we need to say is obviously in computer science, naming things is one of the difficult things to do, right? So there's loads of different things called SpecKits. But I'm hoping that we can talk about something very specific today that is a GitHub release. So it's on GitHub. You go to github.com slash github slash spec kit.
And the idea is it's a kind of like a specification-driven toolkit for whichever AI agent you want to involve.
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Chapter 5: What are the benefits of using SpecKit in existing projects?
Now, obviously, it's a GitHub project, so they probably want you to use Copilot, but I don't use Copilot, so I can't really say how good it is. But the idea is... You open spec kit in a directory with your code, and you say, hey, agent, we're going to work on some stuff, but I'm going to provide you with the specification and a plan and a bunch of tasks, and then you're going to do it.
So the idea is it's like back and forth. building up a very detailed plan of what you want to do. Rather than going, hey, AI, build me the thing. It's like, here's all of the information you need and maybe some research stuff. Now go build it, right? Which sounds like a really big lofty task, but actually spec kit helps you to do that by
If there are gaps in what you're telling the LLM, it says, hey, go to Google or your search engine of choice or look in the code and fill in the gaps of knowledge and tell the user what you've found, right?
Interesting. So is it almost like you're developing a project plan up front and then feeding that in or is it conversational?
So it's kind of a bit of both. The idea is that we live in a world where the code is king and the specification is kind of this woolly thing that somebody else writes, maybe a business person, maybe a BA of some kind, maybe a project manager of some kind, someone who probably doesn't know much about the technology you're going to implement. And that's a good thing and a bad thing, right?
We always want to try and delay the technology decisions until the last minute because then that gives us more options to play with. So in that respect, having someone who isn't technical, who isn't an engineer of some kind, having them write the spec makes that easier because they don't know what an ORM is or what programming language you're going to use, right? So you get to make that decision.
And we've done that for a very long time where we'll write a spec and then we'll build the feature. Well, this is actually flipping it on its head, where what you want to do is you want to keep the specification in source code, because then you can see where you've come from.
So rather than having your Jira tickets or your Trello tickets or whatever separate, you keep it all in-house in the code base. And then you can see how we got to where we are. So every time you build a feature, there's a bunch of files that you create with SpecKit that outline how that feature is meant to be built.
And then you finish that feature, merge back to main and carry on with your life, make another feature, merge back to main. And then there's this like a record of who built what and when and what was the decisions. Almost like having an ADR, like an architecture design record. And the idea, you're working with the LLM to help you write those. And then you say to the LLM, I'm happy with that.
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Chapter 6: How does Jamie Taylor utilize AI in his development process?
I'm going to install in inverted commas, spec kit and init it. And then I'm going to say, Hey, spec kit. First thing I want to do is I want to say, Hey, go create a constitution, right? So the constitution is this markdown file that sets up the, all of the different coding standards for the particular project we're looking at.
So it might set up things like, oh, we use a linter, use this particular editor config or test-driven development. So I'm from a .NET C sharp land, so it might say, make sure that you do .NET format, which is kind of like linting, but not 100% every time.
Chapter 7: What are the limitations of AI tools in software development?
Right, like a RumoCop or a Flake kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly right. Setting up the rules of how the code should be written and then setting up things like if you are doing test-driven development, this much code coverage is a bare minimum. Or maybe, you know, first-party packages first, then widely supported third-party packages, and then maybe experimental ones if there isn't something that supports what we want to do.
So the first thing it does is it sets that up. And then that way, regardless of what you ask your LLM to write, it will always look at that first and say, am I about to write something that's insecure, that violates the Constitution? So you've got that operating environment already. And because these are markdown files, you can jump in and edit them as you go.
Or you can gently nudge the LLM as it's writing them and say, actually, Yeah, that's great, but maybe I care about, because maybe this is a web app, maybe I care about what OWASP have to say. So I go and say, go find the rules that OWASP recommend for this type of application development, and then grab those, put that in the constitution, and then that way you might not get...
Yeah, so you'll be protected against things like SQL injection, things like that, and cross-site scripting and all of these wonderful things that you no longer have to worry about because all the code that you're going to write with this LLM is already protected against. So that's the first thing it does. So yeah, you do spec first. So that's specification. And you say, here's the spec.
I'm thinking like project manager BA level. This is what we want, a feature that allows the customer to check out. We're not talking about technology. We're not talking about the hows. We're not talking about the whys. We're talking about the whats. And you can be as detailed as you can or just say, build me a checkout system, whatever.
I like to put, and this is going to scare some folks because some folks don't like lots of typing of words. They like to jump in with the code. But I like to put in as much detail as I can. So I'll probably do three or four paragraphs of this is my specification for this one feature. And I'll go ahead and hit return. What happens then is spec kit goes, cool, that's awesome.
Hey, LLM, the user has given you this specification. I want you to read through it. Split it into actual specifications. Split it into user stories and functional requirements and things like that. What was the user not clear about? That kind of thing.
So it automatically starts asking you questions about, well, you said a checkout system, and I can't see that there is a store in this kind of app. Are you sure that you want a checkout system for this web API? I think you've got this project the wrong way around. So it starts to ask you these questions about what you want, what technologies you want, all this kind of stuff.
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Chapter 8: How does SpecKit ensure code security during development?
Right. So like a common thing, like I use warp a lot and a common thing will be like, it'll say, I'll be like, I want to copy these files from this server to that server. La la la. Right. I use it for a lot of DevOps stuff. And I always, I've learned that the trick is to always, cause I use Claude underneath, always ask it. Do you understand what I actually mean? And yes.
Do you have any questions? Right. Just like you would with like a super, like an intern, right. Or a junior, like a super junior developer. Yeah.
and it's is spec kit kind of doing that because it sounds like it is it sounds like you write the constitution and if let's say claude or whatever comes back with well i'm going to do it like this spec it would actually before even talking to you it seems like like no that violates this rule of you must pass you know whatever this.net validator is or you must use libraries only
I'm assuming you could say all kinds of things, right? Like I only want to use NuGet packages published by Microsoft, theoretically, if you had, right? Is it doing that proactively or is that still something you have to intervene?
So what it's doing is it's putting your LLM agent assistant, whatever in that mode already. So it's telling you what the rules are. So then when it goes away and generates that code, it already knows I'm not allowed to use, for instance, I'm only allowed to use Microsoft new get packages. Or if, you know, I'm only allowed to use these particular things that are available in my Ruby environment.
And maybe I'm not allowed to use this kind of coding or that kind of coding, right? Then, I'm trying to think of things that are abstract enough that probably apply to lots of different languages rather than just .NET things, because then only I understand it.
How about where applicable, always use the ORM, right? Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter which ORM. Okay, so just to really hammer down on this point, it's not that it's a middleman. It's that it's actually seeding the context, and when necessary, when the context has to be cleared, it's re-updating the context,
to the current state with the current rules based on your initial creation of the spec per feature. I know that sounded very persnickety, but is that right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. So the idea is you create a feature by defining a spec, then defining the plan, and then splitting it into tasks. If we go 10,000 foot view, you have a feature that you have. Somebody comes to you and says, I want to check out feature. That's your feature. You create the spec for the feature. It needs to use these kinds of, I'm expecting to be able to
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