Threaded Miami: Trace.Space and introducing Space Agent!

What if requirements engineering did not feel like 1994?In this episode, Janis Vavere and Matt Maclaine explain why Trace.Space is going straight at one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in engineering: requirements, traceability, compliance, and the painful workflows that still live in the shadow of legacy tools like IBM DOORS. Their pitch is not just that the old tools are clunky. It is that modern engineering teams need a completely different architecture if they want AI to be genuinely useful. Janis lays out the core idea behind Trace.Space: an AI-native requirements platform built from the ground up for modern systems engineering. Instead of bolting AI onto an old stack, Trace.Space is designed around a graph-based structure that makes requirements, traces, tests, and reviews machine-readable and ready for agentic workflows. The company also positions itself carefully for enterprise reality: on-prem or cloud deployment, bring-your-own-model support, and the ability to connect into a company’s own AI environment rather than forcing data into a generic public chatbot workflow. Matt then shows what that looks like in practice. Their new Space Agent can surface semantically relevant requirements, suggest traces, help build compliance and audit analyses, and generate structured outputs from the data already inside the system. The point is not just speed. It is reducing the amount of time systems engineers waste digging through pages of documentation and clicking through bloated workflows just to find what matters. A big part of the appeal here is that the AI is not a black box floating above the tool. Because it is native to the platform, users can still inspect outputs through more traditional views like traceability matrices, saved filters, reviews, and test management flows. That makes the pitch much more credible for teams working in regulated industries like automotive, aerospace, defense, and robotics, where trust and auditability matter as much as automation. This is a conversation about replacing bloated requirements management with something faster, more explainable, and more aligned with how engineering teams will actually work in the AI era.#RequirementsEngineering #Traceability #SystemsEngineering #AI #EngineeringSoftware #Compliance #ProductDevelopment #TraceSpace #DigitalThread #PLM #AI #AIAcrossTheProductLifecycle