ASDLC 0.1 describes how software gets built when most of the work is done
by agents running in parallel and CI/CD is the only gate. It is a
description of a practice already in production, not a proposal.
The traditional SDLC assumes the scarce resource is engineering time, so
it spends process on deciding whether each change is worth building. When
agents write the code, engineering time stops being scarce and two other
things become scarce: human attention, and trunk stability.
Nine phases: frame, fan out, gate locally, merge, release, verify live,
correct, ratchet, promote. Correct returns to fan out, so the loop is the
lifecycle.
The load-bearing phase is the ratchet. Testing in production is only
defensible if production failures are one-time events, so every escape
becomes a permanent automated check before the incident is closed, and
that check has to be confirmed to fail when the bug is reintroduced. A fix
without a ratchet is how the same class of bug ships three times.
Four conformance levels, of which only level 3 requires evidence rather
than intent. The worked example is DiskPush on 2026-09-06: eight agent
worktrees on one checkout, four releases between 08:53 and 14:56 UTC, and
a three-release desktop bug whose first layer no local harness could have
caught, because a static server resolves absolute paths correctly by
construction and the bug only existed under file://.
Published at /asdlc with the spec at /docs/asdlc, listed in the nav,
sitemap and llms.txt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012Q2bt449mEJSHoEZzaemCn
