The “agile is dead” argument appears on a reliable cycle, usually authored by someone who spent years watching organizations adopt the ceremonies, terminology, and org charts of agile while preserving the planning assumptions, reporting structures, and risk culture of waterfall. The frustration is legitimate. The conclusion is wrong. What failed in most organizations was not agile. It was a management consulting product that appropriated agile vocabulary while systematically removing the practices that give agile its value.

The promise was efficiency. Feed the prompt, review the output, merge the diff. What teams discovered instead is that AI-assisted code review is more cognitively demanding than reviewing code written by a colleague — not less — because the nature of the errors has changed. When a human writes a bug, there is usually a traceable cause: a misunderstood requirement, a missed edge case, a copy-paste error. The bug has an author with intent.