Mark O'Connell
Belfast, Northern Ireland · AI strategy & engineering
I work on AI strategy and AI-native development at EverQuote. Most of what I do involves figuring out how software teams actually get value from AI, rather than just adopting it and calling it a win.
sdlcnext is where I write about that. The focus is on what the data says, not what vendors say, about AI and developer productivity, spec-driven workflows, and where the software development lifecycle is heading. Posts are grounded in specific research: DX, DORA, METR, GitClear. I try to cover the findings I find uncomfortable as honestly as the ones that fit my priors.
Uniquely I give the reader the option of picking which lens they would like to view the content from; AI skeptic, Balanced or AI dominant.
My background is software engineering. The AI strategy work grew out of a long-running interest in how engineering processes actually change when new tooling arrives: what holds, what breaks, and the gap between what research shows and what gets repeated in conference talks. The SDLC 2.0 framing came out of work I've been doing since mid-2025 on where spec-driven development fits in a world where AI can write most of the code but still needs to be told what to write.
If something here is wrong or you have data I haven't seen, I want to hear it.