CS Cassie Shum Vice president of ecosystem at RelationalAI, working on production AI systems built on knowledge graphs, after twelve years at Thoughtworks on agentic and data-...

“We don't want to be the new waterfall.”

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026

Context

Shum is describing what she and Tim Cochran keep hearing from enterprises bolting agents onto their development process: an intense new focus on getting the spec right so it can be handed off. Her objection is that heavy up-front specification recreates the thing agile was meant to end. She asks teams when an idea ever reached the customer as the same idea it started as, and says almost none of them say it did.

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Transcript

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast Around 07:41 into the episode

Cassie Shum

…actually means is it doesn't just stop from the spec to the PR, right? So how do you close that loop from a value sense? How does that actually come back to the product? And that's why we talk about the two closed loops and they're both equally important and they need to feed off of each other.

Tim Cochran

…Because, you know, right now developers don't have to spend two weeks to build a feature, right? They can actually come up for air, you know, after like half a day or a day and they can maybe collaborate a bit more. So that's that's more about like why we're sort of thinking about these two loops.

Cassie Shum

…time, they said, oh, no, it's not. Because going back to some of the fundamentals that we've talked about for years is like you have to iterate and learn on that idea. And so the question now begs is, how do you do that with the agents? How do you do that with builders and agents and iterate that and create a system to do that? And so that's why those two loops are incredibly important as well. We don't want to be the new waterfall. We want to actually embrace that collaborative approach of actually creating an idea and finding value in that using the agents that we have now.

Ken Mugrage

Is it the same problem frame differently? Because like if we think about the DevOps movement, what the last 16, 17 years, that was all supposedly, I say supposedly because it got hijacked a little bit about feedback loops and making sure that product teams were seeing how things run in production…

Tim Cochran

I would say it's absolutely the same problem. I think what AI, and it's, you know, what old is new and all that kind of thing. And I think it's really what AI is doing is accelerating, right? And, you know, the promise of agile or the dual track software development, we've always wanted to have…

Cassie Shum

I think that acceleration is going to expose all of the different bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle process. It's not just engineering anymore. And I'm going to hubble bragg Tim a little bit. So five years ago, he wrote about the developer effectiveness. You know, he wrote on…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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