ADLC: Why Judgment Must Move Upstream
SD Times, Friday, October 16th, 2026
In the agentic development life cycle, engineering expertise shifts upstream into specifications and approval gates.
The author compares agentic coding to early auto assembly, where fitters' skills moved into jigs and gauges.
One team built three systems over 18 months: the first took seven months, the second four, and the third five weeks with two engineers instead of twelve.
In the ADLC, engineers specify intent and own approval gates while agents plan, write and review code, test, deploy and triage.
Production issues should produce durable upstream artifacts such as contract clauses, regression tests or shared context updates, or the same defects recur.