Chris Williams

Chris Williams published seven pieces on the agentic development lifecycle, all carrying the date 2026-06-12, and closed the series with running code: eighteen open-source tools at github.com/voodootikigod/adlc, built with the cycle they describe. He founded JSConf and writes as @voodootikigod.

The opening argument, in «Stop Running the SDLC on Models That Aren't Human», is that the traditional lifecycle defends against human failure modes (ego, fatigue, forgetting) and is therefore mismatched to models. Williams catalogues eight model failure modes and five properties worth exploiting, then imposes a rule on everything that follows: each phase, gate and loop must trace to one of them. Teams concluding that agents do not work have applied a human process to a non-human profile.

What the sequence builds from there is a chain of deterministic checkpoints. Tests are written by specs-only agents and frozen at the tool layer, because a constraint living in the prompt layer is a request while a constraint living in the tool layer is a fact. Review becomes prosecution: fresh single-lens agents chartered to refute, findings admissible only once reproduced, the loop repeating until two consecutive passes come back empty. Scheduling stays in scripts, judgment in models. Spending is counted per merged and verified change, and a flat cost curve counts as failure.

Williams keeps an honest loss account against his own doctrine: architectural elegance in one pass, subtle cross-cutting intuition, latency, long-horizon refactors. Roughly 5% of the work still runs at maximum supervision.