AI-Theme Reskin of Agile and Scrum Ceremonies - #152

So… I’ve been thinking… what if we replaced the entire Agile canon of ceremonies, artifacts, and roles with its AI-theme equivalent. Here’s the the map and the models:

Ceremonies

• Sprint Planning → Context Window Planning — decide what fits in the window before it overflows - truly useful. For example, I keep my load.md files > 200 lines.

• Planning Poker → Token Poker — estimate cost in tokens, not story points; everyone reveals their k count at once… lol.

• Daily Standup → Daily Inference — what I generated, what I’m decoding next, where I’m rate-limited. Daily blockers are still real.

• Sprint Review → Eval Review — demo the output, score it against the rubric. Doing this now.

• Retrospective → Fine-Tune Retro — what to reward, what to penalize next epoch. Did you know that ai works harder (better) when threatened?

• Backlog Refinement → Prompt Refinement — sharpen the asks so they actually one-shot. Always improve the details!

• Sprint → Epoch — one bounded delivery cycle.

Artifacts

• Story Points → Tokens — the unit of estimated cost

• User Story → The Prompt — “As a user, I want…” becomes the system instruction

• Acceptance Criteria → The Eval Set — pass/fail before it ships

• Definition of Done → Stop Sequence — when generation is complete

• Product Backlog → The Queue — pending requests waiting for a window

• Burndown Chart → Token Burn — watch the budget deplete in real time

• Velocity → Throughput (tok/s) — how fast the team decodes

• Epic → The Corpus — a big body of related work

• Spike → Temperature Spike — timeboxed exploration, crank the creativity

• Tech Debt → Hallucination Debt — the plausible-looking stuff you have to go back and verify

Roles

• Scrum Master → The Orchestrator

• Product Owner → The System Prompt

• Dev Team → The Fleet

• Stakeholders → The Eval Judges

While many of these ideas are tongue-in-cheek, the reality is that much of this is actually what I help clients do on the daily. With AI, you can actually measure things you couldn’t (really) measure before. Good, and bad.

The best main characters in games have the best gear.

It makes sense that any knowledge-worker has power tools. Agile, after all, is just ai.

Best,
ps