Sprint is long dead. A fixed two-week cadence stopped making sense once daily delivery became normal – and that was before generative AI. But the answer isn't to abandon agile: it's to strip away the ceremonies that accreted around it and rebuild your practice from the core principles and motivations, which apply better than ever.

Read the Agile Manifesto again, with it's four value statements and twelve principles. It says nothing about sprints, story points, or standups. Working software over comprehensive documentation; responding to change over following a plan. Written in 2001, it fits today's pace better than the pace it was written at. The ceremonies were one generation's implementation of those values at a particular speed of delivery; when the speed changes, you re-derive the practice from the principles rather than defending the rituals.

I'd argue AI is best understood as the latest step in a twenty-year speed-up of software development, not a discontinuity – and seeing it as continuity makes the right responses much clearer and less reactive. The questions people treat as new ("now we need to think harder about what to build") have been live for ages. In my own team, re-deriving the practice at daily-delivery cadence looks like: continuous merging ("if it's better than what we have and won't adversely affect our users, merge it"), work sliced to a day or less, and keeping the most important thing the most important thing.

Key question/s: Which ceremonies would you reinvent from scratch at today's speed, and which quietly disappear? What replaces the sprint, the standup, the retro?

Reading/links

• The Agile Manifesto (and its twelve principles) – four sentences from 2001; still the core, still applies
• Scrumban – the halfway house many teams land on
• The Linear method – an opinionated modern take on structuring work
• Elephant Carpaccio – slicing work for fast feedback loops