The Agentic SDLC

Pratap Lakshman — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:53:30 +0000

Can an AI Agents Actually Follow the Software Development Lifecycle?

AI coding agents are getting remarkably good at building applications.

Give one a prompt like:

"Build me a web app that counts the most frequently occurring words in a piece of text."

and you'll probably get something working.

But can an AI agent follow a software development process?

So I tried it.

Here is a simple word-frequency web application built using five separate stages:

Requirements → Design → Implementation → Testing → Deployment

Instead of giving the agent one giant prompt, each stage produces an artifact that becomes the input to the next stage.

The result is a working application at the end of the entire process.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mXdO_WMC70

But the interesting part is that you can run the experiment yourself.

Give it a try and see what gets built.

We've spent a lot of time teaching AI to write code.

The next step is teaching AI to follow the software engineering process.

Instead of saying:

"Build this application."

we say:

"Take this application through requirements, design, implementation, testing and deployment."

That's a very different way of thinking about AI-assisted software engineering.

AI in the SDLC

Pratap Lakshman — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:25:49 +0000

For those experimenting with AI in the SDLC: Where do you experience the most friction today? Let me know your comments!