Even agents need discipline
Agents are a proxy for your discipline. If you have been using LLMs in any capacity, you already know it, but consciously — the exact ability LLMs lack. Now draw your attention to AGILE and what it brings with it: EPIC, SPIKE, STORY, TASK, Definition of Done (DoD), the INVEST principle and what each letter in it holds, and a few other things like meetings, coffee breaks, shower ideas. I have painted many opposing thoughts on the canvas intentionally, but where am I going with this?
The goal is to think it through with you as you read. If you can recall the most effective and optimized AGILE team you have worked on, what was the process? I am sure it involved multiple teams and stakeholders coming together to deliver highly valuable features and experiences.
The question is: do AI innovations make all the processes and principles obsolete and outdated, or is the essence preserved while the mechanics of applying it have evolved?
If your answer is that the processes and principles I have mentioned were never an effective way in the first place, then we have opposing opinions — regardless, keep disagreeing till you agree, because I am going to show you THE GOOD PARTS.
The key point I am driving home is: How to transform your Team or Organization to be AI First.
The Discipline and the Good Parts
The pre-AI workflow expands or collapses with different value streams. The boxes hold the work. They do not hold the people — their different experiences, their different tastes.
If you notice, it is a process. Each box serves its purpose well.
Now look inside one box.
The story refinement meeting. You may think of it as a waste of time.
Where does the call-to-action go on the hero image of the home page?
You already have an answer. So does everyone else in the room, and none of you are answering the same question.
Product wants it above the fold, because the funnel says so. Design wants it where the eye lands, not where the metric points. Engineering knows the hero is a shared component, so the change is not local. QA asks what happens at 360 pixels wide.
Twenty minutes, for a button that moves forty pixels.
Somebody senior could have said left and shipped it, and it would probably have been fine. That is what makes it look like waste.
Here is what the twenty minutes bought. The button is the smaller half of it. The four of them now agree on what will produce the valuable outcome. Every acceptance criterion written to achieve a goal gets written deliberately.
The deliberation is the nuance. Written and spoken language never captures the whole.
I do not believe any of the good parts are changing. In fact, in agentic-first orgs, the discipline and principles have to be defined more clearly. Saying otherwise is wishful thinking.
Here is the nuance about the nuance. Some of it was captured, and captured well. The criteria made the story testable and demoable, and that is not a small thing.
The ticket had no field for the rest of it.
Skill. Communication. Psychological safety — a room where the junior engineer can say the funnel is wrong. The drive to make the thing good, and the need that made anyone care in the first place.
Those are human things, and they are what drove the high-value outcome. The people mechanics were never static either. The same four argue differently next quarter, because they remember this one.
That lived in the team's culture. Not in a document, and not lost either.
What does that mean in an agentic-first org?
Before you read on, answer this.
What was the refinement meeting for?
Most people say sizing. Some say writing the tickets properly. A few say it existed for the product manager's benefit.
Hold on to your answer. If it was any of those three, the next two years are going to cost you more than you think.