glossary · term
agentic SDLC
Also called agentic software development life cycle
A software delivery life cycle in which AI agents do real work at each stage, from planning through operations. People set the intent and verify the results. Most organizations are building one whether they intend to or not. The choice is whether they design it or inherit it by accident.
in practice
How I use the term
The tools are the least interesting part. Every product in the pipeline now ships an agent that wants to help at every step. Few teams have decided where each one should stop, so the result is more output and less clarity.
The durable changes are structural: who writes the spec, what counts as the product, and how work gets verified. Turning a clear specification into code gets cheap, so the constraint moves upstream to framing and downstream to verification.
AI did not create the broken handoffs between product, design, and engineering. It exposed them. Those handoffs were already messy, and teams now move fast enough for the mess to show.
in the essays · 5
Where it shows up
- The Agentic SDLC: Uniting the AI Tool Sprawl
Names the system and draws the lanes between tools.
- The Spec Is the Product
Code becomes regeneratable output, and the spec becomes the durable asset.
- Two Gates and a Night Shift
The pipeline up close, with human judgment placed at two gates.
- Nobody Pages the Agent
Where the pipeline ends: operability has to enter the spec.
- The Prompt Is Not the Permission: Securing the Agentic SDLC
Securing it: permissions bound the work that instructions only describe.
see: Context Spine · spec-driven development · agent