The funeral nobody is sad about
Let's be honest about something we've all been pretending not to notice.
Scrum is dead.
And almost nob...
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Hallelujah!! There is justice!! 😃
This hits several key points that match my experiences, but aren't always easy to explain. Especially when it boils down to conversations like, "The customers are unhappy, we must double down on Jira so we can prove to them they should be happy." (ugh)
Exactly this. We've built an entire industry around the illusion of control. Estimating, tracking, and explaining the delay has somehow become higher priority than actually shipping the solution.
Yes! This!
Was talking to a co-worker about this exact topic today and your article encapsulates it nicely.
The agile manifesto was sooo incredibly well articulated - there is surprising detail/nuance in the words/order/meaning, that can easily get lost/missed.
The desire/tendency to convert everything to a (stable+repeatable) process is the problem - thinking that process => consistency, reliability, predictability, etc... With the process structure providing a stable foundation is totally the wrong way of thinking about it. The process isn't a starting point and a foundation you build on - which is what we've largely done - to drive behaviours so you don't need to think about them. Instead, it should be a gentle nudge to help to support progress.
As always, this isn't binary, which is why the agile manifesto is so good :)
just I've got the cert. than this happened 😃
Well at least now you can say that you are certified to explain why it sucks!
Your mechanism argues against your conclusion, I think. If organisations pick the practice over the principle because practices are legible, teachable and auditable, that's a property of organisations rather than of the tooling - so agents don't remove the preference, they leave it looking for a new object. Your own sober bit names the object: verification is exactly the kind of thing that gets turned into coverage gates, review checklists and a certification to sell. What died may be the Scrum brand rather than the thing that produced Scrum. What would convince you it's the second one?
You make a really strong point about organizational psychology: companies naturally gravitate toward legible, auditable practices over abstract principles, regardless of the tools they use.
Where I see a fundamental shift this time around, however, is what those new practices actually look like in execution:
Alignment with the Core Principles: You're right that humans will always default to practice over principle because practices are concrete. But with Scrum, those practices (rigid sprint planning, burn-downs, velocity tracking, daily standups) actively fought against the core tenets of the Agile Manifesto ("individuals and interactions over processes and tools", "responding to change over following a plan"). The practices became a bureaucratic overhead designed to manage human throughput limits.
A "Lean" Default: Coding agents alter the nature of those practices. Instead of administrative ceremonies to align humans, the new legible and auditable practices are technical and automated: continuous integration, automated test suites, pull request validation, and verification gates. Because agents can draft, execute, and verify code at unprecedented speeds, the "practice" shifts from coordination overhead to continuous verification.
My bet, though, is that the sheer speed and asynchronous nature of agentic coding make standard Scrum ceremonies so actively friction-inducing that companies will be forced to adopt a much leaner, event-driven process. We are still picking practices over principles, but for the first time in 20 years, the default practices actually align with being agile.
That is a bet with an observable in it, which I appreciate. But CI, coverage gates and required checks are not new, and they have a track record of accreting: the gate starts as "does it build" and ends as a threshold nobody can lower without a meeting. If the only difference is that the practice is technical, the failure mode is still a number managed for its own sake, measured on machines instead of on people. What would you expect to see by year two that would tell you it went the other way this time?