The Collapse of the SDLC

Or - how the software industry spent fifty years perfecting a relay race, only to discover it was a sprint, run by one person Somewhere right now, a project manager is updating a Gantt chart for a feature an AI agent finished last Tuesday. The chart says "Requirements Phase - 3 weeks". The requirements were gathered in a two-hour exhaustive ai interview, turned into a spec before lunch, implemented right after the spec was written, and documented by a different agent while the code was being created, presumably out of politeness. The Software Development Lifecycle is not dead. It has been compressed from six months into a few afternoons, and nobody has told the process diagrams. A brief history of standing in lineThe SDLC was never a law of nature. It was a coping mechanism. Phases existed because handoffs existed. Handoffs existed because no single human could hold requirements, architecture, implementation, testing, and documentation in one head at commercial scale. So we invented…