§1 The argument
60 years of process, built for the wrong failure modes
Code review, standups, and sprint ceremonies all exist because humans forget, tire, and protect their egos. Models do none of that. They fail in their own ways, and a lifecycle that never checks for those failures will pass them straight through.
| Dimension | SDLC (built for humans) | ADLC (built for models) |
|---|---|---|
| Defends against | Human failure: forgetfulness, ego, fatigue | Model failure: premature satisfaction, sycophancy, context rot, reward hacking |
| The spec | A requirements document humans interpret | Tests are the spec, frozen as rails before the build starts |
| Review | Peer code review: does a colleague approve? | Prosecution: fresh reviewers charged with breaking the change, and findings must reproduce before the builder sees them |
| Unit of trust | The engineer who wrote it | Explicit exit contracts: deterministic evidence plus human attestation |
| Audit trail | Commit messages and ticket comments | gate-manifest: a verdict ledger auditors can read |
| Cost over time | Process overhead compounds | Findings distill into deterministic defenses (P7), so the same failure is caught by a lint next time |
§2 Implement
Run it against your own repository
curl -fsSL https://www.agenticlifecycle.ai/install.sh | shmacOS and Linux, Node 18+. Then adlc init in your repository. Windows is not supported. Every install channel →