Story Points Don't Survive First Contact With an LLM
Here is a failure mode that happens quietly, at every company with a mature Agile practice that decides to add an LLM feature: the team estimates the work in story points, assigns it to a two-week sprint, and then spends three sprints in a row reporting "70% done" while the engineering manager stares at a burndown chart that refuses to burn down. Nobody lied. The feature is genuinely hard to finish — because the conditions that make story points a useful planning tool don't exist for AI features, and nobody noticed until they were already committed.
The problem is not that engineers are bad at estimating. The problem is that story points encode assumptions about the nature of software work — assumptions that LLM features violate structurally, not accidentally.
