# Scrum was a harness

**Author:** Alexey Krivitsky
**Date:** 2026-09-11
**Reading time:** 2 min
**Category:** AI & Engineering
**Tags:** scrum, agentic-engineering, harness, ai, org-design, agile, 10x-org
**Canonical:** https://krivitsky.com/post/scrum-was-a-harness

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**TL;DR:** A tribute to common sense.

At the end of the day, Scrum was apparently a human harness to contain and orchestrate group intelligence.

Instead of making the agents hallucinate and eat all the token allowance, Scrum asked humans to focus on a small set of high value work, agreeing on the outcomes and time-boxing the session for max of two weeks.

Apparently, the agents did not like it. They wanted to stay autonomous, independent and do whatever they wanted without being interrupted for mid-session context corrections.

There was this wild idea of one prioritized super-list of work items that the agent should tackle one by one, respecting the order. They tried to sabotage the process and tick the issues that matched their prior context window.

At the end of the session, the people who paid the token bills rightfully wanted to review and question the outcomes, making sure that the agentic system improved over time.

Surprisingly, the individual agents saw the preparation time for the product review as waste. They wanted to stay in the flow indefinitely.

In Scrum, there was the super-agent. Its only goal was to make sure that the agents did not forget the outcomes and were addressing their blocking issues in time and with fewer tokens burned. That super-agent was mainly seen as an unnecessary role, that cannot directly contribute to work.

Oh boy. How blind and self-centered we were…