The AI-Native SDLC Playbook

A technical guide for how to transform your software development lifecycle (SDLC) with AI. Organizations have started using AI to write code at a speed unthinkable one year ago, yet the processes around the code haven't changed at the same pace.

14 lessons1 hr

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What you’ll learnBy the end of this course, you’ll be able to

Explain why planning, review, testing, and deployment become the bottleneck once agents write most of the code, and why they still run at human speed
Capture an idea as intent.md, a short version-controlled file that states what is wanted, why, and under which constraints, and turn it into a requirements and design spec in one working session with Claude
Maintain institutional knowledge as versioned machine-readable CLAUDE.md files and skills
Weave continuous evals through implementation, with layers of agentic review and human review reserved for regulated and critical code
Enforce governance as the AI acts, with hooks as approval gates, and close the loop by writing breached control bands back as a new intent.md

Many engineering teams still have the same approval gates, reviews, handoffs, and policies, stalling productivity gains made by using agentic coding solutions like Claude Code.

In this guide, we walk through several of our Applied AI team's best practices for integrating Claude internally across each stage of the SDLC to accelerate development and make processes run faster, inspired by working with our customers.

Who this course is for

This course is for engineering, platform, and security leads whose organization already uses Claude Code and whose approval gates, reviews, and handoffs still run at human speed. It is written for large enterprises, and especially regulated ones, where the review queue cannot be allowed to build and code cannot ship under-reviewed. The plays assume you can change how your organization plans, reviews, tests, and deploys, not only how it writes code.

Prerequisites

You should be comfortable working in Claude Code day to day, and have a Git repository and CI pipeline you are allowed to change. Each play names its own prerequisites under Getting started, and several have none.