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
- Ryan Edge on X
- “Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter” (Ryan’s book, Packt)
- OpenSpec (the spec-driven development tool Ryan uses)
- opencode (the model-agnostic agent harness he uses for adversarial reviews)
- Addy Osmani’s blog (Ryan’s recommended reading on agentic and context engineering)

