Agile served an important purpose. Break large problems into smaller ones. Work iteratively. Learn quickly. Adapt as you go.
Over time, though, we also built a fairly defined operating model around it. Epics, stories, tasks and sprints. Scrum ceremonies. Jira boards. Useful structures, but structures nevertheless.
Somewhere along the way, the structures around Agile began to obscure the spirit of agility. At least for me.
There is another aspect worth questioning: many of these units were sized for people. A story is something a developer can reasonably finish in a sprint. A task fits into a smaller window of work. We decomposed work this way because that is the size a person can estimate, own and execute.
AI changes that assumption.
A coding agent like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can often operate on a much larger unit of intent, build, test and iterate without requiring the same human-sized decomposition upfront. How large that unit can safely be depends on the maturity of the harness around the agent, the context, constraints and evaluation it works within.
But the unit no longer has to be what one developer can finish in a sprint. Decomposition will still have its place. The difference is that it becomes a tool chosen for the intent, rather than the default shape of the process.
This becomes especially relevant in pod-based, AI-aided development, what some now call agentic software development. A small team can increasingly own an outcome end to end, with agents expanding its execution capacity. In that environment, forcing every intent through the same hierarchy of epics, stories and tasks can become an unnecessary constraint.
That does not make Agile obsolete. Agile can evolve with this. But perhaps the more interesting question is whether adapting the existing model is enough.
That leads me to a different development model: Intent-Based Development.
The pod owns the outcome. The intent provides direction. The execution path adapts.
Sometimes an agent may build and iterate directly. Sometimes the first step is experimentation. Sometimes it is configuration, composition of existing services, generated code, or discovering that nothing needs to be built.
The developer's role changes with it. Less about mechanically decomposing work into predefined units. More about expressing intent clearly, providing context, defining constraints, evaluating outcomes and applying judgment.
Intent leads. Process adapts.
Perhaps the next evolution of Agile is not another methodology. It is an operating model where agility becomes a property of the development system itself.