Blue Blazes S04E09: Getting Started with AI Dev – featuring Ryan Edge

In this episode, host Jonathan “J.” Tower sat down with Ryan Edge, a senior software engineer, Flutter Google Developer Expert, and co-author of “Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter,” to talk about getting started with AI-assisted development. Ryan went from zero trust in AI coding tools to high confidence in what they produce, and he walks us through how: start where the stakes are low, put guardrails in your context files, lean on golden tests and end-to-end tests, and run your specs through the same review process as your code.

If you’ve been holding off on AI-assisted development, or using it without ever quite trusting the output, this episode is for you.

Guest Bio:

Ryan Edge is a senior software engineer and Flutter Google Developer Expert living in Charlotte, North Carolina. His primary focus is front-end mobile and web development with Flutter and React, with back-end work in Node.js, GraphQL, Vercel, Supabase, and Firebase. He is a co-author of “Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter” and organizes Flutter Charlotte and GDG Charlotte. 

Additional Resources:

• Ryan Edge on Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/edge/

• Ryan Edge on X: https://twitter.com/chimon1984

• OpenSpec (the spec-driven development tool Ryan uses): https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec

• opencode (the model-agnostic agent harness he uses for adversarial reviews): https://opencode.ai/

• Addy Osmani’s blog (Ryan’s recommended reading on agentic and context engineering): https://addyosmani.com/