The promise was clear: no more long planning phases, no rigid documents, no separation between thinkers and doers. Small steps, fast feedback, continuous learning.
What we got: sprint plannings that run three hours. Backlog grooming as a full-time job. Certification programs that prioritize conformity over outcomes. Story point estimates as a political bargaining tool between teams and management.
The bureaucratization of agility is not an implementation failure. It is the predictable result of deploying an anti-bureaucratic tool inside a bureaucratic system. The system absorbs the tool, not the other way around.
The real bottleneck was never the method. It was the throughput of human cognition. People can only process so much information, make so many decisions, write so much code per day. Scrum optimized that bottleneck. It made human work more visible and coordinated.
AI removes that bottleneck. When agents can execute continuously, without planning cycles, without capacity constraints, the methodology question becomes secondary. The question is no longer: "Which framework optimizes our work?" But: "What should humans still decide?"
For that question, no agile framework has prepared an answer.
Thoughts? Find me on Bluesky.