DO-178C

The calculus changes when somebody outside your team gets to ask questions.

Under IEC 62304, ISO 26262 or DO-178C, the requirement, the approval, the test derived from it and the evidence tying them together were always going to be produced, by hand, at real expense, whether or not an AI agent went anywhere near the codebase.

that paperwork is a condition of shipping the product at all spec driven development adds nothing to a regulated program's obligations it is the first approach with a plausible route to discharging them without a person hand assembling every link for most software the skeptics are right for software that can hurt somebody they aren't how to choose a spec driven development tool the honest summary of this category in mid-2026 is that it's young and it's moving fast SpecKit will show you whether the method suits your team, at low cost, and its weaknesses will teach you what to demand from something heavier.

Kiro brings real requirements discipline if your engineers can live in its eyed.

There are other processor-related standards.

If you're going to be doing something for avionics, for example, there's DO-178.

Um, could you talk about how those come into play, and how you should really be designing a system, even if you're not required to have, you know, various levels of security and, uh, safety by design?

So, uh, if you're familiar with functional safety and cybersecurity from, uh, what's referred to as a design V cycle-

Medical devices under FDA rules and IEC six two three zero four and six zero six zero one.

Avionics under DO-178C.

Automotive under ISO two six two six two.

These all demand traceable requirements and documented verification and validation, and they demand it for a reason.

Stress test three: Mechanistic interpretability, or rather, the lack of it.

When the FAA certifies avionics software under DO-178C, it requires deterministic code that can be mathematically verified before a plane leaves the tarmac.

You can trace every execution path, prove correct behavior under every specified condition.

That's why commercial aviation has a safety record measured in fatalities per one hundred million passenger miles.

Let me talk for a moment about what software certification on transport category aircraft actually involves, because I think it helps frame why these findings come up periodically and why the FAA's determination carries technical weight.

Commercial aircraft software is certified under a standard called DO-178C, which is published by RTCA, and is the baseline the FAA uses for evaluating airborne software.

The standard categorizes software by the severity of the effect if it fails.

Level A is catastrophic.

And we think we've got a good story about bringing rust to avionics.

So for DO178C as well.

But fundamentally, it's the same compiler built from broadly the same source code.

It will be like buying a copy of Enterprise Linux as opposed to downloading a free copy of Debian.

The engine monitoring system that watches your cylinder head temperatures.

DO-178C applies across certified aviation.

Scale to the criticality of the system.

The type certificate data sheet for your airplane reflects testing under standards from the same family of documents.