u/dainasantos

Full disclosure: I work for Altium on the team building Requirements Portal, so this is what we think about all day. Right now I'm just trying to understand how smaller hardware teams actually handle it.

Genuine question for teams building physical products. When you kick off a project, how do you define your project (the specs, the constraints, the "must not exceed X" stuff)?

Most small hardware teams we talk to manage requirements in Excel or Confluence. That's fine at the start. The problem is six months in when you have to go back to remember how you implemented a requirement.  

A few questions for the thread:

• At what point does a spreadsheet stop being "good enough" for tracking requirements?
• Do you write this stuff down formally, or is it mostly tribal knowledge?
• What does your project definition process look like?
• Do your implementation engineers ever reference the requirements doc during design, or does it only come out during review?
• Has anyone tried a dedicated requirements tool for a sub-10 person team? What was the friction?

Appreciate all the feedback on this.

Disclosure: I work for Altium on the team building Requirements Portal, part of Altium 365.

If you're already using Altium, you may have heard of Requirements Portal, our cloud tool for managing engineering requirements and verification.

We've just launched Agentic AI for Requirements, and I wanted to explain what it is, especially for anyone who sees "AI" in a requirements tool and immediately gets nervous. That reaction is fair, so let me be clear about the boundaries first.

What it will never do: it doesn't act on its own, it doesn't change anything in your project without you approving it, and it doesn't replace the person responsible for requirements. There's no autonomous agent editing your spec behind your back. The principle we built everything on is simple: AI proposes, you decide.

What it's actually for is the tedious part of the job:

- Cleaning up the busywork: drafting or restructuring requirements from docs you already have (a PDF, a spreadsheet, an email thread) so you're not retyping everything by hand. You review what it produces before anything sticks.

- Catching review errors: surfacing gaps, inconsistencies, or missing traceability links, so errors get caught early.

- Reusing your team's standards: you can define how your team writes or checks requirements once, and apply it consistently, rather than re-explaining it every time.

Everything is a suggestion you approve or reject. The engineer stays in the loop on every change, while the AI just does the grunt work that usually eats the time.

Genuinely curious how this community feels about it:

- is the busywork (writing up requirements, keeping them consistent, checking traceability) the part you'd actually want help with? Or is there something else that's more painful?

- Where's the line for you: what would you want AI to help with, and what would you never want it touching?

Happy to answer anything about what we've built and why.

Full disclosure up front: I work on a requirements tool at Altium (Requirements Portal), so I'm biased. But this is a genuine question. Opinions on my own team are split, and I want to hear how this community actually feels.

Everyone seems to agree on one thing: AI should never silently change a requirement. The disagreement is about how far it should go before a human steps in.

Three positions I keep hearing:

1. Propose-only: AI drafts and links, a human approves every change.

2. Auto-apply the trivial stuff: formatting, obvious traceability links and flag only the judgment calls.

3. Keep AI out of the requirements themselves entirely, fine for search and Q&A, nothing that writes.

For those of you managing real specs: where's your comfort line, and has it moved in the last year? And if you've already tried AI on requirements, what earned trust, and what did you switch off?

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Full disclosure up front: I work on a requirements tool at Altium (Requirements Portal), so I'm biased. But this is a genuine question. Opinions on my own team are split, and I want to hear how this community actually feels.

Everyone seems to agree on one thing: AI should never silently change a requirement. The disagreement is about how far it should go before a human steps in.

Three positions I keep hearing:

1. Propose-only: AI drafts and links, a human approves every change.

2. Auto-apply the trivial stuff: formatting, obvious traceability links and flag only the judgment calls.

3. Keep AI out of the requirements themselves entirely, fine for search and Q&A, nothing that writes.

For those of you managing real specs: where's your comfort line, and has it moved in the last year? And if you've already tried AI on requirements, what earned trust, and what did you switch off?

Olá a todos!

Quero ir ao cinema hoje com a mulher e desde a adolescencia que utilizo o cartão NOS da minha mae para usufruir do 2x1. Acontece que ela no mês passado decidiu mudar para a DIGI, porque como provavelmente sabem, a diferença é noite para o dia em mensalidade.

Desta forma, gostava de saber se alguma alma carinhosa estaria disposta a facultar o 2x1? Caso seja cartão NOS só é necessário o nr do cartão para o checkout, caso seja WTF, julgo que é atraves de geração de um código.

Obrigado desde já!