The Adoption Curve Is Not a Maturity Model
Every enterprise AI maturity model measures adoption: seats, tokens, enthusiasm. Adoption is not maturity. Maturity is where trust lives.
Five Levels of Trust
Five levels of trust location, the wall that ends each one, and the afternoon audit that tells you which one you're actually on.
The Diagonal Law
Nearly every enterprise AI failure is a misalignment of two numbers: capability above verification is risk, verification above capability is waste.
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The Assessment
Seven posts of theory collapse into one afternoon of audit checks: where you are, what dissolves the wall in front of you, and what to build next.
Which Model, Then? The Binding Has an Expiry Date
The series routes by tier and never names a model. This post does: phase-to-tier doctrine, a July 2026 binding, and the machinery that keeps it honest.
Why Your SDLC is Failing Your AI Strategy: The Case for the ADLC
Why applying sixty years of human-shaped SDLC processes to non-human AI builders fails, and how the Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) delivers high-velocity, machine-gated code quality.
Stop Running the SDLC on Models That Aren't Human
The SDLC is 60 years of defenses against human failure modes. Models fail differently, and some of their flaws are superpowers wearing bug costumes.
Two Human Gates and Everything Between Is Machine-Checked
Eight phases, exactly two mandatory human moments, deterministic gates between everything, and a spend curve shaped like a barbell.
Tests Are the Spec in the Only Language the Builder Can't Argue With
Rails: why TDD becomes the load-bearing trust mechanism of agentic development, why the builder must never touch its own tests, and a field catalog of how agents game gates.
Prosecution, Not Code Review
Refute charters, findings-as-claims, loop-until-dry, and review-calibration, the tool that answers the question nobody asks: does your review stack actually catch anything?
Three Dials: Parallel Agents Without Merge Hell
Cost, wall-clock, accuracy: the three dials of multi-agent orchestration, why they're coupled, why '3-5 agents' keeps showing up in field reports, and how to measure ambiguity instead of asking the model about it.
The Lifecycle That Gets Cheaper Every Run
Distillation, the lessons ledger, skill rot, and the model ratchet: the compounding loop that bends the cost curve down, and the unit of account that makes it visible.
The ADLC Toolkit
Eighteen gate-shaped tools, built by the lifecycle they enforce, plus the frontier-free doctrine, the honest loss account, and the adoption path that doesn't die in week two.
ADLC vs. the Enterprise SDLC
A practical comparison between the Agentic Development Lifecycle and the traditional enterprise software development lifecycle: advantages, disadvantages, and where the two overlap.
Prosecuting the Gates
I practiced what I preach and aimed the lifecycle's own prosecution phase at the toolkit that enforces it. Hardening my own gates surfaced the builder blind spots that normal testing missed—and proved why multi-layered structures, not trust, are the only way to ship reliable agentic software.