In this second installment, Chris Williams turns the ADLC's "first law" into a concrete cycle: eight phases, a deterministic gate between each pair, and exactly two mandatory human moments. The governing principle is that a direct LLM-to-LLM handoff, without a deterministic checkpoint, multiplies error rates — each probabilistic component wired to another compounds the error. The gates (compilers, test suites, validators) reset that accumulation to zero.
The cycle opens at P0 (Triage): route work by risk and blast radius, not complexity; trivial work short-circuits the full cycle, substantial work goes through all eight phases. P1 (Interrogate) is the highest-leverage phase: an agent interrogates stakeholders after consulting the codebase, which prevents generic assumptions from filling gaps in the spec. Its output is a specification where every acceptance criterion names its verification method. This is where Human Gate 1 sits — spec approval, the point of maximum human value.
P2 (Decompose) defends against context rot by splitting the spec into atomic tickets executable by fresh agents, with explicit contracts at the boundaries. P3 (Rail) writes tests, type stubs, and contracts from the spec in isolation, then freezes them — the builder cannot modify them. P4 (Build) launches one agent per ticket on mid-tier models by default, with two-strike regeneration (kill a stalling agent and restart clean) and no personas — capability comes from context, tools, and charter. P5 (Prosecute) deploys fresh agents chartered to refute, with the burden of proof resting on reproducibility, up to two consecutive passes finding nothing. P6 (Integrate) opens Human Gate 2 — behavioral acceptance: the human checks spec conformance, test diffs, runtime behavior, and hotspots — not the full diffs. The question is "is this what I meant, running?" Finally, P7 (Distill) simplifies and mines recurring lessons into lint rules, templates, and skills.
Williams insists on a "barbell" spend distribution: heavy at both ends (planning, proving), light in the middle (executing). This inverts the classic agile economics where "misbuilding is what's expensive." He explicitly rejects full-diff review (theater beyond 500 lines), personas, write-time DRY, and coverage-percentage gates — each rejection traced to a specific documented failure mode.