Saying Goodbye to Agile

Working in technology teams to build things I've practiced Agile delivery for decades. The arrival of automatic programming capabilities is throwing everything up in the air.

One unambiguously positive development that's followed is that software professionals are writing specs again. LLMs - like many of us - do not perform well with ambiguity, and specifying problems is proving to be an effective tool for generating correct code. Agile told us "Working software over comprehensive documentation". Spec-Driven Development is telling us "Comprehensive documentation creates working software".

I've been building a bunch of things with agentic coding tools and this is how you do it. By the way, almost everyone also uses agents to help in creating that specification.

The part that everyone misses in this though is the "why" we should make this change. The fundamental issue is less about spec driven development, and more about the fact that making a mistake is 10x less expensive than it was before. You can ask the agent to refactor it and you are on your way pretty quickly.

That one issue, what is the impact of something being wrong, is the single most important thing that needs to go into figuring out how you do the work. And automatic programming is changing that in dramatic ways. It was changes to programming languages and moving into more interpreted and dynamic development environments that enabled agile. What is it that automatic programming is enabling?