Behind the Craft · 3 min instead of 47 min · Oct 11, 2026
Planning by talking to the agent, not writing specs
Ras Mic
Full-stack Engineer
Peter YangHost · Host, Behind the Craft
Led product at Roblox, Reddit, Twitch and Meta for 10+ years.
About this segment
Mic skips spec documents and talks through ideas with the agent by voice for five to thirty minutes. He cut an email service cost by having Cloudflare email suggested mid-discussion.
From “The 4-Step Agentic Engineering Workflow I Use to Ship Real Apps | Ras Mic”, Oct 11, 2026. Watch the full episode
“planning for me isn't the agent writing the spec and me reviewing the spec and me saying, go build it.”
Takeaways
- Conversation history serves as the spec
- Voice back-and-forth surfaced a cheaper Cloudflare email option
- Ask the agent to write setup files for things to revisit later
In this episode
Full episode- 21:29A Greptile score loop makes agents fix their own PRs4:34
- 10:41Make agents prove a bug exists and prove the fix4:50
28:17Planning by talking to the agent, not writing specs2:30
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 28:20
One thing that I think you didn't quite cover is how do you, let's say you want to ship a new feature, do you write some sort of a spec or do you just kind of by voice, like, hey, built this feature. Here's like stream conscious. My planning, and this is just how I am as a person. I like to, the way I think is I talk through, right? So the way my planning sessions really work, and I could write this down, is I literally yap to the agent for, I would say a good amount of time, like five to 10 minutes where, and I guess this is just how my mind is wired. I'm even for personal notes and stuff like that or the way I sort of train or how I study or even like how I read books and stuff. I have to read out loud. Like I have to hear it. So the reason why I've never really done a detailed, I'd have like one video on planning maybe is because I understand conventionally most people
- 29:08
might not think like this, but the way I plan is I'll have something in my mind and the only way I can get it out and explain it thoroughly is if I continue to talk. So I'm pressing FN on my Mac with Whisperflow and I'm having back and forth. Like, and I maybe can bring in this, here's the thing with Codex. It loves to do all this tool calling, but I essentially will go back and forth with my agent discussing even random ideas.
- 29:36
Like for example, I think you might find this interesting. I have this app called Bezalo and I was using email service for agents and I hit the free tier. I hit the free tier and, you know, it got a little expensive to upgrade. So what I did was I literally had a back and forth with my agent. And this is another example. I'll explain this example in a second. I went back and forth with my agent. And it was like, oh, dude, you can use Cloudflare email.
- 30:02
And you can basically build the same thing. It wouldn't be too hard. There's a couple things that we missed. And I looked at the Cloudflare email docs. I read about it. And then we continued to have this back and forth. It took about like 27 minutes or 30 minutes of back and forth until I finally realized, okay, this is the feature I want. I want it to have tracking. I want it to have custom domains.
- 30:19
So planning for me isn't the agent writing the spec and me reviewing the spec and me saying, go build it. Planning for me is me and the agent discussing and I'm having a YAP session and then I'll tell the agent what I want and then I'll go build it. So again, not the most conventional way for most people, but I will find if you are the type of person who needs to talk when they think, this is perfect for you.
- 30:46
Okay.