Frameworks · AI Don't Fix Stupidity

The Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) and the deployment gate

The Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) is not a replacement for the Software Development Life Cycle; it is an extension of it, adding the steps a non-deterministic system needs on top of everything disciplined engineering already demands.

Steps

  1. Propose
  2. Evaluate
  3. Measure
  4. Verify
  5. Deploy
  6. Monitor

Deployment gate

  1. Right problem
  2. Right build
  3. Right proof
  4. Right to run

Because an agent does not behave the same way every time, evaluation is "a gate, not a stage": automated, unattended and blocking, with golden-set and adversarial cases run on every proposed change. Online evaluation separately samples live traffic against the same rubric and compares the results with offline evaluation to detect drift. Human verification judges only what the suite cannot and cannot be skipped. Deployment is staged from Customer Zero to pilot to canary to full production. "Every change to a system instruction is a deployment, and every deployment is measured." Every capability then passes one deployment gate of four questions.