Agile is dead. Here's what's next...

Agile is dead. There's really no other way around it. If you're still running agile ceremonies, or they're being forced on you while you're trying to build in an AI World, then you're getting left behind. I'm Pete. I run a software development agency in New York City. We work with startups and Fortune 500 companies to bring their products to market. And over the last few months, I built a social network almost entirely by myself. No delegation, no internal team, no pulling in senior engineers that I literally employ. And this should sound... wrong. Building something solo wasn't my goal, but it forced a question I couldn't ignore. Why did this feel faster than involving a team I deeply respect? And the answer wasn't ego, it wasn't capability. It was process. Roles have changed, and the process had to change, too. Agile doesn't make sense in an AI world. Now, to be clear, agile wasn't wrong. It evolved for a reason. Waterfall failed because you could spend months spec-ing something end to end, build it, only then to find out that you're going in the wrong direction. You receive no signal. And agile tried to fix that by promising feedback. The problem is, agile buried the feedback loop under ceremony. So 15 minute standups turned into half hour meetings. Or sprint commitments that you can't break when reality changes. Or six month roadmaps pretending the world stands still. Like you finally get real feedback and the answer is cool, we'll prioritize it next quarter... That doesn't work anymore. And in an AI world, everything happens immediately. With AI, you must spec everything clearly upfront. If you don't, you get garbage. That part is very waterfall. But once you have good specs, execution collapses to near zero. You can build instantly, ship instantly, and test instantly. So the really hard work is no longer building. The work is chasing signal. And to be clear, this is product management. I spent decades as Head of Product at various companies. But now that people can build this fast with AI, product management is no longer a role reserved for one department. So everyone needs product judgement. Roles will collapse and ownership will increase. Individuals will now take things from idea to signal. So I call this S2S, Spec to Signal. You move from clear intent to real world signal as fast as possible. I wrote all of this out on my Substack. Tell me where I'm right, tell me where I'm wrong. The link is in my bio.