How Slack's First Employee Manages AI Agents (The "Spec-Driven" Workflow)

In this episode of After Coding, Keith Adams sits down with James Scheinblum (Jamie/Jimmy) and Johnny Rodgers (JR), co-founders of Supernice. JR was Slack's first employee and a founding team member, and Jamie was one of the company's earliest engineers. We are moving past the era of typing syntax and into the era of managing systems. Jimmy and JR walk through how they have completely abandoned manual coding for a pure agent-driven workflow, explaining why the traditional "first commit" is dead and how a living folder of agent-readable specs serves as their new source of truth. Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction & Welcome 01:37 - Life in Late 2026: The Shift to AI-First Coding 04:04 - Slack's Hidden "Token-Maxing" Leaderboards 06:00 - Greenfield Startups vs. Big Tech Incumbents 07:28 - How Supernice Uses Living Specs for AI Agents 09:30 - Terraform, Makefiles, and the End of Niche Specialists 11:31 - The Emotional Shift: Losing the Coding "Flow State" 14:35 - How AI Replaced the Debugger 17:11 - Learning to Code: On Paper vs. Interactive AI 21:33 - What AI Agents Still Struggle to Understand 23:48 - The Dynamic Range of AI Skill & Who Writes Specs 27:13 - Collapsing Roles: The Rise of the Product Engineer 31:37 - The Limits of "Vibe Coding" & Why Taste Matters 33:06 - Why Software Hasn't Had Its "AlphaGo" Moment Yet 37:22 - The Real-World Bottlenecks AI Can't Automate 39:15 - What is Supernice? Building Multiplayer AI for Social Apps Connect with Pebblebed & After Coding: Website: https://pebblebed.com