AWS Veteran: The New Software Development Life Cycle

About this episode

"I need to stop using Opus. This doesn't work." That was Heitor Lessa's conclusion after a refactor cost him 200 million tokens, and it forced him to rebuild the entire agent workflow now available for 1400 engineers. Heitor spent 11 years at AWS, built Lambda Powertools to 230 billion API calls a week, and in this episode he walks through the full SDLC workflow on screen, from discovery to merge check. In this episode, we cover: • The product loop: discovery, whiteboarding, and the /roadmap command • Spec-driven development with Open Spec and why vanilla setups fail • Three model tiers: SOTA for planning, mid-tier for implementation, cheap models for reviews • Merge checks with adversarial reviewers and attestations that catch agents fabricating test results • The /retro command: using the Socratic method to make your workflow more deterministic If you're an engineer figuring out how to work with agents at team scale without losing trust in your codebase, this is the workflow to steal. This is also the first Beyond Coding episode with visuals on screen, so let me know what you think of the format. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - The Math Doesn't Add Up 00:00:43 - Amazon Hypergrowth: 11