The AI-Native SDLC Starts with Your Infrastructure

Anthropic's AI-native software development lifecycle playbook restructures the SDLC around coding agents, with each stage producing artifacts for the next stage to consume. However, the framework's critical gap lies in Stage 4's feedback loop: it assumes agents can verify their work against tests and builds, but doesn't address how to test against real dependencies like databases, APIs, and external services—a problem developers understand intuitively but agents cannot. This infrastructure challenge of setting up proper verification environments becomes the actual constraint that determines whether the entire process functions effectively.