---
title: "Spec-Driven Testing for Agents With A Brain the Size of A Planet — Steven Willmott, SafeIntelligence"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/spec-driven-testing-for-agents-with-a-brain-the-size-of-a-planet-steven-willmott-safeintelligence-mtc6haxe7
source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQKg0td-Bf4
type: video:youtube
source: "AI Engineer"
published: 2026-05-31T15:03:44.739Z
updated: 2026-05-31T15:04:04.858Z
tags: ["testing", "llm", "ai-agents", "ai-safety"]
reading_time: 13
upvotes: 1
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Spec-Driven Testing for Agents With A Brain the Size of A Planet — Steven Willmott, SafeIntelligence

**[AI Engineer](https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer)** · 13 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A conference talk by the CEO of Safe Intelligence covering spec-driven testing and validation for AI agents. The core argument is that evaluating agents requires more than a dataset of input/output examples — it demands explicit specifications covering business rules, domain ontologies, user roles/permissions, and robustness requirements. The speaker draws parallels to formal verification techniques used in vision model validation and advocates for task-specific benchmarks that go beyond standard evals. Key points include: larger models aren't always safer (some jailbreaks work better on smarter models), broader agent capabilities create larger attack surfaces, and specs should remain implementation-independent so tests can be reused across infrastructure changes. The talk also touches on using agent specs to inform security/penetration testing and iterative robustness improvement.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQKg0td-Bf4>

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---

Tags: [#testing](https://daily.dev/tags/testing), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#ai-safety](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-safety)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/spec-driven-testing-for-agents-with-a-brain-the-size-of-a-planet-steven-willmott-safeintelligence-mtc6haxe7)