[HN Gopher] The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead
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The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead
Author : zenon_paradox
Score : 34 points
Date : 2026-02-21 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boristane.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boristane.com)
| dtagames wrote:
| This is an article that's so ahead of its time that it's likely
| to be ignored. The TL;DR is that true agentic development doesn't
| _improve_ the software dev lifecycle, it throws huge chunks of it
| in the trash.
|
| When your context environment and constraints are properly
| designed, many planning, testing, and review stages can simply be
| skipped. It's remarkable but true.
| bensyverson wrote:
| Yes, LLMs can basically short-circuit the entire product design
| and development process if you want them to. You can write
| "Give me a goal tracking app" and pretty reliably one-shot it.
| Success?
|
| I think a lot of folks would benefit from re-reading the Agile
| Manifesto [0]. Unfortunately in the corporate world, "Agile"
| became almost a perfect inversion of the original 12
| principles, but in the age of AI, I think it's more relevant
| than ever. Back when you could only get through a handful of
| "user stories" per week, there was tremendous pressure on
| developers to prioritize the "right" ones, which led to more
| and more layers of planners, architects and delivery leads.
|
| Now the feedback loop between the customer, business and
| developer is as tight as it always should have been.
| [0]: https://agilemanifesto.org
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| It's ahead of time the same way as sci fi novels writing about
| fusion energy sources. May happen some day, we don't know when.
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| Agreed. People aren't ready for this, even (maybe especially)
| on HN.
|
| Everyone's hung up on how nobody really does waterfall. Or
| course. But a LOT of people are vibing their code and making
| PRs and then getting buried in code reviews. Just like the
| article says, you can't keep up that way. Obviously. Only
| agents can review code as fast as agents write it. But I find
| as of recently that agents review code better than people now,
| just like how they write it better. Gotta lean into it!
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> But I find as of recently that agents review code better
| than people now, just like how they write it better.
|
| Let me guess: you're building a system that uses AI agents to
| replace all the PR-type tasks most of us waste their time
| completing?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > Requirements gathering: fluid, not dictated
|
| > Requirements used to be handed down. A PM writes a PRD,
| engineers estimate it, and the spec gets frozen before a line of
| code is written. That made sense when building was expensive.
| When every feature took weeks, you had to decide upfront what to
| build.
|
| In the 20 years I've worked in software. I've never even seen a
| shop that works this way. From 20 person teams to 10,000 employee
| companies. Maybe I've been lucky. but to me it reads as a straw
| man. Something to punch against that doesn't really exist.
|
| > Design used to be something you did before writing code. You'd
| whiteboard the architecture, debate trade-offs, draw boxes and
| arrows, then go implement it.
|
| Again, I've never seen this. Usually it'd be a senior engineer
| who spun up a project, implemented a proof of concept, and then
| mid and junior staff would be onboard and work within the
| project's design patterns, occasionally refactoring the design if
| it outgrew its original footprint.
|
| I don't necessarily disagree with the agent workflow, but we
| should compare it to what actually proceeded it, not some
| imagined dummy process that never really existed. It weakens, not
| strengthens, the piece.
|
| Note: I'm sure _you_ experienced these, but have you considered
| that you 're an edge case? I've equally considered that perhaps
| I've just been extraordinary fortunate in my career.
| p_l wrote:
| Remember, Waterfall model was AFAIK originally just an example
| of pathologically bad managed project in a conference talk :V
| paleotrope wrote:
| Almost everything is a strawman
| scott_w wrote:
| Unfortunately it started to be taken seriously, at least by
| academics who went on to infect an industry. I shit you not
| when I tell you the Software Project Management module I
| took at university described Agile as "Waterfall but done
| much faster" back in 2010/2011.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I've seen this at more than one company.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I'm working in the industry since 1999, spent a lot of time in
| regulated industries and fully agree with you, waterfall was
| never _the_ process. The actual process could generate a lot of
| artifacts, but it was always async, not strict happens-before
| relationship.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Requirements handed down - never seen it in 25 years. The
| requirements are always fluid, by definition. At best, you get
| a wish list which needs to be ammended with reality. If you
| have completely static requirements, you don't need an
| engineer! You just do it. Engineering IS refining the
| requirements according to empirical data.
|
| Once you have requirements that are correct (for all well-
| defined definitions of "correct"), the code implementation is
| so trival that an LLM can do it :-)
| scott_w wrote:
| Same here. It's like the author just finishes their Software
| Project Management module at uni, saw AI and had their mind
| blown without ever learning this thing called "The Agile
| Manifesto" exists!
| Jenk wrote:
| > In the 20 years I've worked in software. I've never even seen
| a shop that works this way. From 20 person teams to 10,000
| employee companies. Maybe I've been lucky. but to me it reads
| as a straw man. Something to punch against that doesn't really
| exist
|
| 30 years ago it was the norm. It really is true that the
| industry (standard) has shifted a _lot_ in that time.
|
| But I work at a place like this right now. I was hired by the
| new CTO to help them change this, having spent the previous 20
| years actively avoiding places just like this.
|
| Project-based planning by a roomful of not-technical people:
| Funding, scope, design, shape of team, deadlines, tech stacks,
| vendors etc. all "locked in" before any engineer is even
| approached, let alone asked for input.
|
| I cannot overstate how uncanny it feels to be working here -
| like I have actually time travelled back to the 90s.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| In the 30 years I've worked in software, I've seen more than
| one shop that worked this way. Then "eXtreme Programming" and
| Scrum rose up and morged into "agile", and that pretty much
| went away.
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| Most, if not the entire article reads to me as AI-generated which
| just makes me uninterested in reading further.
| mat0 wrote:
| I read it for you. Spoiler alert, remained uninteresting until
| the end. I agree with the notion that we will have to adapt our
| workflows now that coding is getting cheaper (at least for
| now), but the author is suggesting to forgo PRs entirely and
| demonises humans for being slow and some sort of bottleneck.
| The author is suggesting that you can let agents go crazy on
| your codebase and that if you don't do it you are some sort of
| dinosaur that doesn't accept change. It's complete nonsense in
| my opinion.
| jackphilson wrote:
| What is your take on the optimal usage of AI, and why would
| it not be N + 1? I think the article is largely correct here.
| marginalien wrote:
| The requirements aka intents, where do they come from? Today,
| there are PMs interacting with customers, analyzing data, reading
| the regulation, connecting insights/demand with business strategy
| to come up with requirements. This is now all done by the
| engineer who out of the blue just has the right intent to
| instruct the agent to code? Please explain me like I'm five.
| matltc wrote:
| Wut
|
| None of this is true today. Maybe it becomes true, but I don't
| know what planet this guy is on where he doesn't have to worry
| about version control and gets perfect code from the agent
| everytime so no need to check and not a single person types code
|
| I agree that sdlc is changing, but dead? Come on
|
| The poles at the ai hype scale are taking on religious qualities
| with these grand proclamations and imagined reality
| moltar wrote:
| Yeah no chance. Quite the opposite. This framework makes the
| process more robust. AI is just an accelerator of what is. I work
| at a company without mature SDLC process and it's chaotic and
| leads to sub standard outcomes. We are actually looking to adopt
| this SDLC process soon because of it.
|
| My mental model on LLMs and agents is that they are force
| multipliers.
| satisfice wrote:
| 43 years in software development: I have not seen the SDLC that
| this guy claims is predominant.
|
| What has ALWAYS happened is that teams of people come together
| and muddle through. We use concepts from the classic "SDLC" to
| discuss our processes, but we never followed it. We did have
| milestones, yes, which is simply incremental development.
|
| When "Agile" appeared, the world was already pretty agile. It
| introduced a new vocabulary and some new values. But it didn't
| fundamentally change the process-- which is exactly why it was so
| widely "adopted." A truly different paradigm would have been
| ignored.
|
| DevOps represented a real phase shift in some respects, and
| agentic development does take that further.
|
| But it's always been people muddling through, and you ALWAYS have
| learning and design and testing. I don't care how you spin it--
| you cannot evade it.
|
| Here is an article from 26 years ago that relates:
|
| https://www.satisfice.us/articles/reframing_requirements.pdf
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Time really goes by. I read "article from 26 years ago" as: why
| would you post an article from the early 80s?
|
| I feel old.
| petersumskas wrote:
| The described SDLC is a recipe for rigorously and predictably
| building the wrong thing.
|
| Does anyone actually work like this? Have they ever?
|
| At the least it misses all the feedback loops between the stages.
| Even the actual waterfall model isn't as linear as the one given
| as an example.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| I'm not anti-AI but I'm starting to feel like I live on a
| different planet to the pro-AI people.
|
| Everything in this article seems fucking insane to me.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| THIS is what makes me so mad: the best software developers are
| really good at evaluating new technologies, they see where they
| work best and where they are not a good fit. They're curious,
| excited, love to share but keep a healthy skepticism and really
| want to understand. They are balanced and look for the nuance.
| They've now been told by their bosses & CTOs that this is not
| good enough; dive in head-first without looking or find a new
| job (no, this is not hyperbole). That monster weight on one end
| of the see-saw keeps pushing me and others towards the other
| end to balance it, but I don't belong there and I'm not a
| Luddite. I want to straddle the middle and shift my weight back
| and forth as appropriate and the pro-AI army keeps pushing me
| away. It drives me bonkers.
| podviaznikov wrote:
| was writing on exactly the same topic today!
| https://github.com/podviaznikov/sdlc-bridge/blob/main/AGENT-...
| blibble wrote:
| it's the Capital A Agile(TM) shysters all over again
|
| put up against waterfall, which no-one ever did anyway
| ptnpzwqd wrote:
| This article seems completely out of line with reality, maybe I
| am living on a different planet.
|
| I have never heard of anyone following those SDLC steps
| rigorously and sequentially. Things tend to be much more
| intertwined, combined, and iterative than this suggests.
|
| Even if agents were writing the code, someone would still need to
| identify what actually needs to be done - requirements don'y
| magically pop out of nowhere.
|
| He doesn't know a single person(!?) still writing code by hand?
| Even the most hardcore believers in coding agents that I know
| still review and revise code by hand. Even the sota models spit
| out garbage if not carefully guided and reviewed (and even then
| quality is still behind an experienced human engineer for
| anything non-trivial).
|
| This all seems so far from the reality I live in...
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This author plays fast and loose by comparing the broad, long-
| term overview of a waterfall project with a dumbed-down close-up
| of an iterative methodology. Just because you put a bunch of
| opinions, or at best naive (and wrong) interpretations into clean
| diagrams doesn't make them right.
|
| There's no such thing as "AI-native engineers"; it's still
| developers who use AI and non-developers who use AI. Why you'd
| want to be in second group is beyond me.
| crustycoder wrote:
| Dead? What, _again_?
|
| Yet another rehash of the smoke and mirrors bullshit I've been
| hearing every 5 years or so for the last 40+ years.
| rapnie wrote:
| I would formulate it as: The software development lifecycle is
| inevitable, or you will not have any software. The lifecycle is
| just not acknowledged and thus implicit to many people. If you
| hack in Notepad, FTP it to your webserver, then your lifecycle
| lasts till you switch it all off. A simple lifecycle, but
| unavoidable to have one.
| senfiaj wrote:
| I don't belong to both "AI has replaced engineers" and "AI will
| never replace engineers" camps. But for now, AI is far from
| replacing SWEs and development processes, especially for complex
| software (that has many complicated specifics, such as
| deployment, migration, specification, code conventions, domain
| knowledge etc).
|
| Yes, nowadays AI is really powerful, our company even encourages
| us to use it for generating some code / documentation or
| reviewing your own code / documentation. In recent years several
| IDEs are integrating it. But it's not a panacea and has its
| limitations. Still, it has to be supervised, the generated code
| should still be reviewed and corrected. You should view them as
| more like an "IDE autocompletion on steroids". You need to
| understand the difference between a vibe coder and a normal
| developer who enhances his productivity with AI.
|
| Currently AI hasn't enough autonomy for fully replacing SWEs and
| development processes (yet). Full stop. The article might be
| correct in 20 years I guess.
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