Your AI Coding Agent Grades Its Own Homework. Add Gates.

TL;DR Your AI coding agent reports "done" after reviewing its own work, so what nobody decided ships, and you find it two weeks later. sdlc is an ai coding agent workflow for Claude Code where the agent that writes a stage never approves it: a different subagent writes the review log, and the next command refuses to start without its PASS. This series follows one feature, case-search, to the QA handoff.

Do this: Run npx agentic-fx@latest install in your project, pick dev, and start one small feature with /sdlc-intake <slug>.

You ask an AI agent to add search to the test-case list. It writes the endpoint and the tests, runs them and reports that everything passed.

Two weeks later you find no pagination, an error shape that matches nothing else in the API, and a page size the agent picked itself. Nothing it said was false. It graded its own homework.

This series, in four parts:

1. Your AI Coding Agent Grades Its Own Homework. Add Gates. (you are here): the problem, and the route sdlc takes.
2. Your First sdlc Run: case-search From Problem to Design: install, then the first three gates and their logs.
3. When Something Changes: STALE, Reaffirm and Who May Override: an edit lands after approval.
4. The Board, the Rules and the Handoff to QA: the agents on screen, the standards, the packet QA starts from.

Three habits cost you the two weeks

The code is usually fine. The damage comes from three habits, and a better prompt fixes none of them:

• It grades itself. The context that wrote the design is asked whether the design is good. It agrees.
• It forgets. Monday's choice is not in Friday's context, so the agent decides again, differently.
• It invents. Ask for a page size nobody gave it and you get a plausible number, not a question.

The route: each stage must earn the next

sdlc is a set of Claude Code commands, agents and skills. A feature runs through twelve stages, G0 (intake) to G11 (monitoring), each with its own slash command. At every stage the same five things happen:

1. The stage writes its artifact, a file you can open.
2. A different subagent, with a fresh context, reviews it. The writer never grades itself.
3. The verdict goes into a log under .sdlc/reviews/.
4. No PASS in that log, and the next command refuses to start. A wrong design never reaches code.
5. A missing fact becomes a DEC question for a person, so nobody invents a page size.

Watch one invention get caught

case-search needed one answer nobody had given: title search or full text? The requirements stage did not guess. It wrote DEC-001 with options and a default, and kept building everything that did not depend on it. The page size was the second question. A person answered it: 20.

One task now waits on a person, and the rest keeps moving. But the pipeline asks you to believe a reviewer's verdict. What does a gate actually write, and how would you know the reviewer did more than nod? Part 2 installs sdlc and runs case-search through its first three gates.

Try it

cd your-project
npx agentic-fx@latest install

Pick dev when it asks (it also adds the VS Code board), then choose one small feature, give it a slug like case-search, and start with /sdlc-intake <slug>. You get files in .sdlc/: one artifact and one review log per stage. sdlc runs only in Claude Code.

Read this with your AI

Read the post "Your AI Coding Agent Grades Its Own Homework. Add Gates.".
1. Summarise the three failure habits and sdlc's rule for each, in 3 bullets.
2. Ask me 3 questions to check I understood; wait, then correct me.
3. Look at my last AI-written feature (below) and say which habit showed up, and which change class it should have been.
<paste a short description of the feature>