Every generation of programmers inherits a method. Waterfall was about planning. Agile was about reacting. Both were about people. They assumed humans would write the code, test it, and ship it.
That assumption is no longer true.
Most people still think of AI as a tool you add on top of a process. An autocomplete for code. A helper that saves time. But if you try to drop AI into a human-shaped process, it won’t fit. The system wasn’t designed for it. That’s why so many people say AI is fine for prototypes but not for production.
The real problem isn’t AI. It’s architecture.
If you start from the idea that agents, not humans, are the default builders, you get something very different. Code has to be broken into smaller pieces so it fits into their heads. APIs have to be designed like contracts so that agents, not just people, can read and coordinate them. The cycle time collapses. Weeks become hours.
Right now this feels chaotic. But so did Agile when it began. To people used to long planning cycles, daily stand-ups and constant iteration looked like anarchy. Over time it became the new normal.
The shift to AI-native systems will be the same. What feels messy now will later feel obvious. Software will be built for agents first, with humans in the loop for direction and judgment. The leverage will flip.
Agile wasn’t wrong. It was right for a world where people were the bottleneck. But we’re leaving that world. The question now isn’t whether AI scales. It’s whether our architectures do.