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.
Everything described in the video is on this GitHub repo: https://github.com/postqode/postqode-community/tree/main/samples/apps/wordfreq
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.
