Second installment of Chris Williams's ADLC series: it unrolls the cycle that follows from the "first law" — eight phases (P0 Triage → P7 Distill), a deterministic gate between each pair, and exactly two mandatory human moments (spec approval at P1, behavioral acceptance at P6). Key principle: an LLM→LLM handoff without a deterministic checkpoint multiplies error rates; and a "barbell" cost distribution (heavy at both ends, light in the middle) that inverts agile economics.
Seventh and final installment of the ADLC series: Williams presents an open-source toolkit of eighteen tools built *with* the cycle itself (build-prosecute-fix loop, parallel agents, a frozen `@adlc/core` core followed by fan-out — "pinned means merged"). The doctrinal core is "frontier-free": hitting accuracy targets with mid-tier models (Opus/Sonnet/Haiku-class) rather than frontier ones, via five substitutions (search replaces insight, decomposition replaces horizon, banking replaces presence, measurement replaces metacognition, the generator-verifier gap keeps the engine running), with the human remaining the "frontier" tier at the two spec gates. Throughline of the series: "replace trust with structure, and structure with measurement."