Saying Goodbye to Agile — a blogger argues the movement has outlived its usefulness

It has been reported that a recent blog post on Lobsters by Lewis Campbell argues Agile was never a coherent doctrine, more a reactionary label than a set of principles. He traces the story back to the Agile Manifesto and finds it thin on prescription and heavy on platitudes; Agile, he says, was defined largely as "not Waterfall." Strong words. Provocative take. And it lands where it hurts: practice versus marketing.

What the post actually claims

Campbell digs into history and reminds readers that many ideas attributed to Agile — iteration, early testing, close customer feedback — were recommended decades earlier by engineers like Winston Royce and seen in empirical work from the 1970s. He contends (and allegedly others have argued) that Agile was often a rebranding of pre-existing engineering wisdom, packaged as salvation. The manifesto’s aphorisms made for great conference slides, less great for engineers seeking concrete guidance; when people asked "what is Agile?" answers tended to be evasive. Sound familiar?

LLMs, specs, and a small revolution

The piece then points to a contemporary twist: cheap LLMs are nudging programmers back toward clear specifications. Campbell dubs this Spec‑Driven Development — the idea that comprehensive documentation helps machines (and humans) produce correct code. Agile’s "working software over comprehensive documentation" feels different under the new light. Is this a rollback? Or progress? He quotes Royce to remind us that documentation, design and specification are not opposites of agility but foundations of it; perhaps the pendulum is simply finding a new center.

Campbell’s verdict is blunt: put Agile "in the dustbin of history." Not everyone will agree. Many teams still swear by standups, story points and continuous delivery. But whether you call it Agile, iterative engineering, or good old-fashioned rigor, the takeaway is the same: practices must earn their keep in the era of LLMs and larger expectations for predictability. The debate is alive again — and, for once, it smells a little like real work.

Sources: lewiscampbell.tech, Lobsters