Never Write a Spec by Hand Again: The FDE Practitioner’s Workflow
Session Overview: Functional specs. Technical specs. Product documentation. Code. If you are still authoring these by hand, you are doing work the machine should be doing for you. This session is the practical companion to the amplification story — a start-to-finish walkthrough of how a Forward Deployed Engineer actually works: turning a customer conversation into a functional spec, that spec into a technical design, the design into working code, and the whole thing into documentation that stays current instead of rotting in a folder. This is process, not theory. We’ll cover how to ground the AI in the real system so it stops inventing things, how to structure your inputs so the first draft is close to right, how to review output fast enough to keep up with it, and the specific failure modes that catch people out. You’ll leave with a workflow you can run on Monday.
Learning Objectives:
- Apply a repeatable pipeline that carries a customer conversation through functional spec, technical spec, working code, and documentation without hand-authoring any of them.
- Ground generated specs and code in the real system — using existing source, data models, and documentation as context — so output is accurate rather than plausible.
- Recognize the common failure modes of AI-generated specs and code, and apply fast review techniques that catch them before they reach a customer.
Speakers: Dewain Robinson
Recorded at: Community Summit NA 2026
Type: Education Session
Ability Level: 201 – Intermediate
Primary Product: Agents & Copilot
Terms: All rights reserved by the speaker, Community Summit NA, and Dynamic Communities and cannot be reproduced or distributed without express written consent by the speaker and Dynamic Communities.
