The Citizen SDLC

AI has collapsed the cost of writing code to near zero, shifting the bottleneck to governance, quality assurance, and managing the growing fleet of AI-built applications. Non-technical employees can now build functional internal tools by prompting AI agents, but without structural guardrails, the output defaults to unmaintainable, insecure, and fragile software — as illustrated by a portfolio operations employee whose 5,300-line single-file dashboard silently self-destructed to 7 bytes. The three common organizational responses — locking down access, permitting unrestricted building, or reviewing everything manually — all fail at scale. The Citizen SDLC is a six-stage framework (idea, front door, triage, provisioning, build, run and change) designed to move non-technical builders from prototype to governed production without requiring engineering skills. The governing principle throughout: AI executes the labor, deterministic code enforces the guardrails, and humans intervene only where judgment is genuinely required.