Discipline and Agents
XP compressed feedback loops until truth became unavoidable. Tests replaced promises. Continuous integration replaced status reports. Working software replaced narrative. You could no longer hide behind process because the system itself reported your progress, loudly and continuously.
The practices that looked like chaos were actually mechanisms for enforcing honesty. Pair programming meant every line of code had a witness. Test-first meant you couldn't ship wishes. Short iterations meant you couldn't hide. The discipline was more demanding than what came before, not less. It just didn't look like the discipline people were used to seeing.
I really enjoyed this article. The first paragraph spoke to my initial experiences with Agile and Pair Programming, though I was second-generation, learning from folks who had worked with Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries. The mentions of chaos and shifting of discipline immediately pinged my coding agent radar, so I was delighted to see the article turn that direction at the end of the intro.
I've been having conversations with engineers around me about the quality downswing, the fact that engineers have hollowed out code review (rubber-stamping, agent-only review), the loosening of discipline. Fowler's Agile lens is really giving me a lot to think about, how to regain the lost discipline, how to reshape the software development process in the face of AI. I agree with his focus on interfaces and automated invariants — small "modules" with clearly defined purposes and interfaces have served me well recently, and I've been considering just how far to implement build-time automation of checks, tests, and so on.