Pascal van der Heiden on Copilot in the Terminal, Foundry in the Cloud, and Chickens for Stress Relief

In this episode, I sat down with Pascal van der Heiden to talk about how fast AI-assisted development is changing the day-to-day reality of building software. We got into his current workflow across Azure, GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code, the terminal, MCP servers, and Microsoft Foundry, and explored why he has shifted so much of his work into a CLI-first, agent-assisted setup. We also unpacked spec-driven development, including where it helps teams move from one-shot prompting toward something more structured, reviewable, and production-ready. We also talked through the practical side of enterprise AI adoption: how customers outside the “AI bubble” are perceiving these tools, where Foundry fits versus personal productivity tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, how to think about guardrails and monitoring for agents, and what developers should do as usage-based billing becomes more common. Along the way, we covered model choice, testing with Playwright, token efficiency, and why human review still matters. And yes, we also opened with an unexpectedly memorable wellness tip: apparently, cuddling a chicken can lower your stress level.Pascal van der Heiden: Pascal van der Heiden | LinkedIn Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ Azure Functions: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/functions/ Azure API Management: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/api-management Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/kubernetes-service/ Microsoft Foundry: https://ai.azure.com/?view=foundry Microsoft 365 Copilot: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-copilot GitHub: https://github.com/ GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot GitHub Copilot CLI: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-cli/cli-getting-started GitHub Copilot SDK: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-sdk/getting-started Model Context Protocol (MCP) for GitHub Copilot: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/context/mcp Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/ Spec Kit: https://github.github.io/spec-kit/ OpenSpec: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec Superpowers: https://github.com/obra/superpowers Playwright: https://playwright.dev/ AI Engineering Fluency (Rob Bos): https://open-vsx.org/extension/RobBos/copilot-token-tracker Rob Bos: https://devopsjournal.io/ OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Gemini: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/