2 posts tagged with "async-work"

"What did you do yesterday?" is the first question of every standup, and on a team that runs agent fleets overnight it has become impossible to answer honestly. The literal answer is: I wrote three prompts, went home, and woke up to eleven pull requests, four of which I have not read yet. The person reciting their update is not lying on purpose. The ritual is lying for them, because it was built around an assumption that no longer holds — that the unit of work is a human doing one thing at a time, serially, during business hours.

That assumption is load-bearing. It holds up the burndown chart, the sprint commitment, the velocity number, the "blocked / in progress / done" columns, and the whole choreography of who-tells-whom-what-when. Pull the assumption and the artifacts don't gracefully degrade. They keep producing numbers that look authoritative and mean nothing. A team can have a beautiful burndown and a green sprint while half its actual throughput happened between midnight and 6 a.m., attributed to no one, reviewed by no one, and reflected in no ceremony.

The team meets at 10am. The first engineer reports what their agents finished overnight. Except the eval suite that kicked off at 7am hasn't returned, the PR the agent opened at 3am is waiting on a review from another agent whose queue depth is unknown, and the long-running refactor agent is on hour eleven of an estimated four-hour run with no signal that it's stuck and no signal that it's healthy. Yesterday's status is not "done" and not "in progress." Yesterday's status is unknowable from inside the room.

The standup was a synchronous ritual built for synchronous human work. Each person did a thing, finished it, slept on it, and reported it the next morning. The unit of work was a workday. The unit of reporting was a person. The cadence matched the substrate. None of that holds anymore. The unit of work is now an agent run that started before you went to bed and may finish during the meeting or three hours after. The unit of reporting is a fleet, not a person. And the cadence — a 9- to 15-minute round-robin at 10am sharp — is a frequency the substrate doesn't produce events on.