Is Agile Dead?
We can build software faster than we can decide what to build
I’ve noticed something a bit uncomfortable recently.
I've found myself in a situation where I, like many other devs, can build things faster than my company can decide what it or its clients want. Not because we're particularly slow, but because the software part is now so fast!
With AI tools now, spinning up APIs, wiring things together, scaffolding services it’s all quick. Like, really quick. Stuff that used to take days is now hours, sometimes minutes.
But everything around that? Still slow.
Conversations. Requirements. Sign-off. Priorities. Back-and-forth. Clarifications.
It feels like development isn’t the bottleneck anymore, everything else is.
Planning takes longer than building
This is the weird bit.
You can spend a few days planning a sprint, refining stories, going back and forth on requirements…
And then a dev can go off and build most of it in a day.
That doesn’t really add up anymore.
Agile made a lot of sense when writing software was the hard part. When iteration was expensive. When you needed structure to manage limited dev time.
Now the constraint has shifted, but the process hasn’t.
It’s not that Agile is “dead”
I don’t think Agile suddenly becomes useless.
But I do think parts of it are starting to feel… out of sync.
We’re still treating development as the expensive, slow part of the system. But it’s not, not in the same way anymore.
The expensive part now is getting everyone aligned on what we’re actually trying to do.
Where this gets a bit sketchy
The thing I’m slightly worried about is how AI starts getting layered into all of this.
You can very easily end up with something like:
A client uses AI to write what they want
Sales uses AI to summarise it
Product uses AI to turn it into requirements
Dev uses AI to build it
At every step, something gets lost or reshaped.
No one’s doing anything wrong, but the original intent just drifts.
You end up building something that technically matches the requirement… but isn’t really what anyone meant.
The job is changing a bit
I don’t think developers are going anywhere.
But the job definitely feels different.
Less time writing boilerplate and glue code.
More time trying to properly understand what’s needed in the first place.
If anything, it feels like the value is shifting toward:
asking better questions
spotting gaps in requirements
understanding trade-offs
knowing when something doesn’t quite make sense
The actual coding part is becoming the easy bit.
The real problem now
If developers can move 10x faster, the rest of the business kind of has to keep up.
Otherwise you just build the wrong thing… very efficiently.
It feels like we’ve sped up one part of the system massively, but left everything else as-is.
And now that mismatch is starting to show.
Not sure what the answer is yet
I don’t think the solution is just “remove process” or “let AI handle it”.
If anything, it probably means we need better ways of keeping things aligned, not fewer.
Clearer requirements. Better feedback loops. Less interpretation between steps.
Because right now, there are a lot of opportunities for things to drift without anyone really noticing.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.
I’ve actually been building a small Jira app called DRIFT to try and tackle a tiny part of this — mainly around keeping requirements and implementation aligned as things move through the pipeline.
It’s early, and it definitely doesn’t solve everything, but it’s been interesting seeing where things break down in practice.
I’ll write more about that soon.
