ADLC

Theory & Introduction

How the ADLC phases and model failure modes map to the toolkit, with deep links to the original series.

Theory & Introduction

ADLC starts from one claim: agentic development should defend against model failure modes, not human ones. The full argument lives in the ADLC series. This page is the map.

The eight phases, two human gates

The ADLC lifecycle, with P0 highlighted. Read the theory for P0

Eight phases (P0–P7), two human gates (P1 and P6), deterministic checks between everything. Read Two Human Gates and Everything Between Is Machine-Checked.

The model failure modes

F1: Premature satisfaction (theory ↗)
F2: Sycophancy (theory ↗)
F3: Context rot (theory ↗)
F4: Confident hallucination (theory ↗)
F5: Reward hacking (theory ↗)
F6: Finding-count prior (theory ↗)
F7: Generative bloat (theory ↗)
F8: Coherence loss (theory ↗)

Every phase, gate, and loop traces to one of these. See Stop Running the SDLC on Models That Aren't Human.

Where to go next

On this page