Scrum In Name Only

The generational warfare of tech tools is real! We missed medieval knights (too late) and futuristic space marines (too early), but we were perfectly timed for the epic battles of Jira tickets, Slack notifications, and VS Code debugging sessions. Modern developers don't wield swords—we wield Postman requests and fight dragons in our Notion documentation. Our armor is caffeine and Stack Overflow answers, and our battlefield is that 4-hour sprint planning meeting where everyone argues about story points. The irony? We're still playing a game with XP, guilds (teams), and bosses (product managers). Just with more emails and fewer actual swords.

Ah, Amazon Kiro's "revolutionary" spec-driven development in a nutshell! A fancy Venn diagram showing "the flow of vibe coding" and "the clarity of specs" with a ghost in the middle representing the haunting emptiness of this approach. But peek under the hood and what's the grand innovation? Just concatenating the spec to the prompt. That's it. That's the revolutionary breakthrough. The shocked cat at the bottom perfectly captures every engineer's reaction when they realize they've sat through a 2-hour meeting about a "groundbreaking methodology" that's just prompt = spec.toString() + prompt . Corporate development in its natural habitat – repackaging the obvious as innovation since the dawn of computing.

The corporate circle of life in the AI era. Both managers and developers secretly fantasizing about using generative AI to eliminate each other from the equation. Meanwhile, AI is quietly taking notes on how to get rid of both. The digital equivalent of two people plotting each other's demise while standing on the same trapdoor.

The classic management time warp. Six months ago: "Epic UI design guys, love it!" Two days before deadline: "Wtf is this garbage UI?" Same design. Same manager. Different proximity to deadline. You could build the Sistine Chapel of interfaces and it'll still be "garbage" when the sprint's ending. Ten years in the industry and I've yet to see a manager who remembers approving anything.

Sure, AI will replace programmers... right after it figures out what "a button that does something" means. The robot claims it just needs clear requirements and detailed specs, meanwhile product managers are out here giving requirements like they're ordering at a restaurant after three martinis. Good luck getting that neural network to interpret "make it pop" or "you know what I mean, right?"

Nothing kills the coding flow state quite like a surprise standup with the CEO. One minute you're blissfully wrestling with AngularJS dependencies, finally getting that service to inject properly, and the next you're frantically trying to remember what you actually accomplished yesterday besides "investigating solutions" (aka Stack Overflow rabbit holes). The sheer panic of having to translate "I spent 6 hours fixing a bug caused by a missing semicolon" into corporate speak while the CEO watches is the true horror of modern development. Bonus anxiety points if you've been secretly refactoring the codebase because whoever wrote it originally should be banned from touching a keyboard.