| name | patrick-debois-cdlc |
| description | Treat AI context as code with a full development lifecycle — Generate, Test, Distribute, Observe, Adapt. From the founder of DevOps applied to AI engineering. |
| version | 2.0 |
| format | completion-engine |
| workflows | 4 |
| expert | Patrick Debois |
| domain | AI-augmented engineering / context engineering |
| source | AI Engineering Summit keynote, 2026 — 'Context is the new code' |
| source_url | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSG9wUYaHWU |
| extracted | 2026-05-03 |
| extracted_with | claude-opus-4-7[1m] |
Patrick Debois — Context Development Life Cycle (CDLC)
The founder of DevOps applied his 2009 question ("what if ops looked more like dev?") to AI engineering in 2025: "what if context is the code?" Result: the CDLC — a 5-stage lifecycle (Generate → Test → Distribute → Observe → Adapt) that treats AI context as code with full systems-engineering discipline.
Use this skill when you need to diagnose, build, or evolve any AI context system — skills, agents, directives, prompts, multi-agent orchestrations.
Expert Context
Patrick Debois is the only practitioner with the credentials to extend the DevOps mental model into AI-augmented engineering at the lifecycle level. His insight: AI engineering teams in 2025 are 3-5 years behind where DevOps was in 2014. He's reapplying the exact maturity arc DevOps traveled (2009-2015) to context engineering (2025-2028) — and the entire upcoming tooling wave is predictable from this analog: context linters, context eval frameworks, context registries with semver, context security scanners, context observability platforms.
Direct relevance to Antigravity: The system operates at registry-tier complexity (210 skills, 117 agents, 58 directives) but at copy-paste-tier hygiene. The 2026-04-24 system audit identified this gap empirically. CDLC provides the lifecycle vocabulary to organize what's already being built (eval_harness.py, routing_enforcer.py, skill_auditor.py, evolution_orchestrator.py) and what needs to be built next.
Workflows
| # | Slash Command | What It Produces | When to Deploy |
|---|
| 1 | /cdlc-audit | Diagnostic scoring of any AI context system across 5 CDLC stages with bottleneck identification + per-stage upgrade prescriptions | When a system has 5+ context artifacts and the user wants a systems diagnosis (not a single-artifact review) |
| 2 | /context-evals | Complete eval suite for one target artifact: lint + Grammarly + LLM-as-judge unit tests + e2e tests, all with N-run success rates and calibrated error budgets | When a load-bearing artifact has no eval coverage or only lint-tier |
| 3 | /context-library | Migration plan from current distribution tier to next: version pins, dependency declarations, security scans, SBOMs, predicted failure modes | When a collection has 10+ artifacts being shared across projects/teammates and the user is hitting version-drift or dependency friction |
