import Link from "next/link"; import type { ReactNode } from "react"; import type { Metadata } from "next"; import { specMetadata } from "@/lib/page-meta"; import { SiteShell } from "@/components/site-shell"; import { mono, pre, table, td, th } from "../openontology/ui"; export const metadata: Metadata = specMetadata( "/asdlc", "ASDLC is the Agentic Software Development Lifecycle: nine phases for building software when agents work in parallel and CI/CD is the only gate, with four conformance levels and a ratchet rule that makes testing in production defensible." ); const PHASES: Array<[string, string]> = [ ["Frame", "A human states intent; the agent restates scope and names what it is leaving out. The one phase where being wrong is expensive."], ["Fan out", "Split into concerns that do not share files. One agent each, one working tree each, running concurrently."], ["Gate locally", "The project's own checks run before anything is pushed. Not a duplicate of CI: it exists to keep the shared pipeline green."], ["Merge", "Merge to trunk. A pull request parked for review that is not coming is a change nothing real has tested."], ["Release", "Cut it in the same unit of work. Where users install artifacts, a merge to trunk reaches nobody."], ["Verify live", "Confirm the deployment is serving the change. A green pipeline proves a build succeeded, not that users got it."], ["Correct", "Production is the test environment. A failure returns to fan-out in minutes, and that speed is why the loop is allowed to be the test."], ["Ratchet", "Every escape becomes a permanent automated check, confirmed to fail when the bug is reintroduced. The load-bearing phase."], ["Promote", "Announce it. Work nobody hears about did not ship in any sense the business recognises."] ]; const COMPARISON: Array<[string, string, string]> = [ ["Unit of work", "A ticket, worked serially", "A concern, worked in parallel by N agents"], ["Isolation", "A branch per developer", "A worktree per agent, on one checkout"], ["Gate", "Code review by a person", "A program: typecheck, tests, CI, release guards"], ["Test environment", "Staging, then prod", "Prod, because staging lies"], ["Done means", "Merged", "Verified live and announced"], ["After an escape", "A postmortem", "A permanent automated check"], ["Cost of a release", "High, so releases are batched", "Near zero, so releases are continuous"] ]; const LEVELS: Array<[string, string]> = [ ["Level 0, serial", "Agents are used one at a time, and a human reviews and merges each change. Most teams calling themselves AI-assisted are here."], ["Level 1, isolated", "Agents work in parallel in isolated trees. The local gate is defined and runs before every push."], ["Level 2, continuous", "Trunk deploys automatically. Releases are cut per unit of work, and the release process itself refuses invalid states."], ["Level 3, ratcheted", "Every recent production escape has a corresponding automated check, each confirmed to fail when its bug returns. Promotion runs as the last phase."] ]; export default function AsdlcPage(): ReactNode { return (

LogicSRC standards surface

ASDLC

The Agentic Software Development Lifecycle: how software gets built when most of the work is done by agents running in parallel, and CI/CD is the only gate that matters.

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 instead:{" "} human attention and trunk stability. ASDLC is what a lifecycle looks like when you optimise for those two.

Status: 0.1. A description of a practice already in production, published so others can copy it, not a proposal.

What actually changes

The last row carries the most weight. Everything else follows from it.

{COMPARISON.map(([label, before, after]) => ( ))}
SDLC ASDLC
{label} {before} {after}

Make a release cheap enough that shipping four times in a day is unremarkable, and the rest of the table follows.

The nine phases

Correct returns to fan-out. The loop is the point.

{`Frame → Fan out → Gate locally → Merge → Release → Verify live → Correct → Ratchet → Promote
           ↑                                                        ↓
           └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘`}
    {PHASES.map(([name, detail]) => (
  1. {name}. {detail}
  2. ))}

The ratchet rule

What separates this from shipping carelessly and calling it a methodology.

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. Not a note in a document: a program that fails, in CI or in the local gate, when the bug comes back.

And the check itself has to be checked. The test for a ratchet is whether it actually fails when you reintroduce the bug, which must be confirmed rather than assumed. A fix without a ratchet is how the same class of bug ships three times.

Invariants

Skip these and you do not have ASDLC, you have moving fast.

Conformance levels

Each level includes the ones below it.

Level 3 is the claim that matters, and the only one that requires evidence rather than intent.

Worked example

DiskPush, an rsync desktop and CLI, on one working day. All of it public in the repo.

Horizontal scale. Eight agent worktrees open on one checkout at once, covering unrelated concerns: SSH auth discovery, symlink handling, fleet runs across servers, the desktop content security policy, file operations, connection defaults and file list sorting. None waited on another.

Cadence. Four releases reached users between 08:53 and 14:56 UTC:{" "} v0.2.17, v0.3.0,{" "} v0.4.0 and v0.5.0, each carrying one merged concern and shipping desktop and CLI artifacts.

The gate refusing. The release script checks every precondition before it writes anything: a dirty tree, a branch that is not trunk, a tag that exists, a version that does not sort above the newest release, and any workspace package missing from its manifest list. That last guard exists because a package was added and silently left behind at an old version, release after release, with nothing failing.

Test in prod, then ratchet. The desktop shipped a visibly broken window across three releases, and each layer was only visible in production. v0.2.0 rendered unstyled: the bundle loaded over file:// and every root-absolute asset resolved against the filesystem root and 404ed. v0.2.1 fixed the assets and rendered blank instead, because the export carries its payload in inline scripts and the window sent{" "} script-src 'self', refusing all seven. That was invisible before only because nothing had run at all. v0.2.2 hashed the inline scripts into the policy.

No local harness could have caught the first bug: a static server resolves absolute paths correctly by construction, so the bug only exists under file://. The ratchet is one command that now guards all three layers, and each guard was confirmed to fail when its bug is reintroduced.

Where everything lives

); }