← The ADLC library
Engineering leadership
A desk of the Fastpace GroundTruth library
What happens to the people when the code writes itself.
The shape of engineering organisations after generation stops being scarce: where the bottleneck moves, what a staff engineer is for, how review and on-call change when nobody remembers writing the code, and which of the old rituals are worth keeping.
FoundationsRoles & orgSDLC vs ADLC 14 articles
Articles
- Linking Azure DevOps work to code, reliably Azure DevOps can refuse to complete a pull request that has no work item attached. Here is how the linking actually works, when to turn that policy on, and what it still will not catch.
- Engineering managers as system designers When output stops being scarce, managing output stops being the job. What is left is designing the queues, the gates and the loops that decide whether the output is any good.
- Linking GitLab work to code, reliably GitLab links issues to merge requests better than any other combination on the market. Here is how the mechanism works, the four ways it still slips, and how to measure the gap.
- The product manager's job in the ADLC When code stops being the constraint, the specification becomes it. That is a promotion for product management and a much less comfortable one than it sounds.
- Code review: from gatekeeper to sampler Reading every diff was always a fiction, and agents turned it into an obvious one. What replaces it is not less rigour but rigour aimed at classes of change rather than individual ones.
- Review is the bottleneck. Adding reviewers will not fix it. The numbers on agentic pull requests are worse than most teams realise, and the obvious response is the one that reliably fails. Queue length is a system property, not a staffing gap.
- Who actually writes your code now, an honest audit Most teams have a confident opinion about how much of their code is agent-written and no evidence for it. Here is how to find out, and why the answer is usually uncomfortable in both directions.
- Linking GitHub work to code, reliably Closing keywords, the development sidebar and Projects automation do more than most teams use. Here is how the link is really made, where it silently fails, and how to measure your own linking rate.
- Linking Jira work to code, reliably How Jira's development panel actually gets filled in, the handful of ways the link silently fails, and how to get linking rate close to 100 percent without adding ceremony.
- Planning: from estimation ritual to derived plan Estimation was never really about accuracy. It was a scheduling device for scarce human attention. When the attention stops being the constraint, the ritual stops paying for itself.
- Requirements: prose for humans versus criteria for agents A ticket written for a colleague and a ticket written for an agent look almost identical and behave completely differently. The gap between them is where most agentic rework comes from.
- What a TPM does when the chasing stops Most of a technical program manager's week is spent reconstructing a status that already exists somewhere. Take that away and what is left is the part that was always the job.
- The two assumptions the SDLC was built on, and why agents break both A human wrote the change. A human kept the plan honest. Take those apart one at a time and you can see exactly which load-bearing wall agents removed.
- What we mean by the Agentic Development Life Cycle The SDLC rested on two quiet assumptions. Agents break both, and most of the pain teams are feeling right now is the sound of that breaking.
The other desks
Delivery & program intelligenceWhat the numbers do when agents arrive. Governance, security & complianceThe questions an auditor will ask, before they ask them. Product & acceptance criteriaDone, defined precisely enough that a machine can check it. Platform economics & toolingWhat this actually costs, and what it is worth.