Food for Agile Thought 551: AI Confidence Theater, We Tried Agile; Didn't Work
This edition of Food for Agile Thought examines "AI Confidence Theater," where teams feign certainty about AI outcomes, and addresses the common complaint "We tried Agile; didn't work," exploring why Agile implementations often fail in practice.
Background
- **Age of Product** is a newsletter/blog run by **Stefan Wolpers**, a German Scrum trainer and coach. It curates links and commentary on the Agile software-development world, often with a critical, anti-hype edge.
- "AI Confidence Theater" is a term coined in the piece to describe teams that display confidence in AI-generated code or decisions without real evidence that the outputs are correct—performative trust rather than validated trust.
- "We Tried Agile; Didn't Work" is a perennial complaint in the industry. The deeper context: many organizations adopt only the surface rituals of Agile (stand-ups, sprints) without the underlying principles (inspection, adaptation, cross-functional autonomy), then blame the methodology when they fail to get results.
- This issue links to several other articles, so the title signals a meta-commentary on two current dysfunctions: hype around AI in software teams and shallow adoption of Agile practices.