Agent Dailies and the Flipped Development Cycle

Posted on Sun 15 February 2026 in posts

TL;DR -

After my nightly rest and while thinking about my day ahead, I realized that the our "daily standup meetings" in the current paradigm may need to be flipped. We are used to update on our progress (human centric), but we probably need now to report on the progress of the agents that have been running for the past 24 hours. Our current challenge is to optimize the Human In The Loop workflow and provide the relevant context to the agent in an efficient and timely manner, transforming us into Agentic Engineers .

My Aaha moment in my morning shower

If you're still treating AI coding agents as glorified autocomplete, you're missing the architectural shift: agents don't sleep, don't take weekends, and don't have "flow state" limitations. The real productivity unlock isn't making developers faster during their 8-hour window—it's inverting the workflow so human "prime time" is spent on verification, steering, and complex decision-making while agents churn through backlogged tasks overnight.

Historical Context: From Scrum Rituals to Asynchronous Collaboration

We built Scrum around human constraints: daily standups assume everyone reports on there working hours. This made sense in 2001 when Agile emerged as a reaction to waterfall's rigidity, but this workflow assumes your entire team has circadian rhythms. Agents break that assumption—they're the first "team members" that can genuinely work async without coordination overhead, but our rituals haven't caught up.

The Technical Deep Dive

Pillar 1: Task Decomposition for Asynchronous Execution

The hardest part isn't giving agents work—it's decomposing tasks into units that can provide a robust plan that has a viable progress path. You need to develop a workflow that starts with clear understanding of the task at hand. We should replace our Engineering mindset to a Product Manager attitude, where our concentration should be on the functionality output, this has been examplified via methodology such as Spec Driven Development and speckit workflows.

Pillar 2: Observability and the "Morning Review" Workflow

Your daily standup should now have two phases: what the agents attempted overnight (with logs, diffs, test results) and what humans will tackle today. This requires tooling beyond GitHub notifications—you need structured summaries of agent decisions, branching strategies for speculative work, and a way to triage "agent-generated PRs" without context-switching hell. The flipped classroom works because teachers can see student work before class; you need the same visibility into agent output.

Pillar 3: Trust Boundaries and Verification Overhead

Agents are probabilistic, not deterministic—so you're trading "writing code" time for "reviewing generated code" time. The ROI depends on whether your verification process is cheaper than authoring from scratch. A robust set of guidelines (for definitions and code development) with structured template is a necessaty for a successful workflow. The current state of the project (brown/green field) is less of an issue, but how you direct the agent is more of a challenge.

Pillar 4: The Workflow Inversion Pattern

In the flipped classroom, students watch lectures at home (passive consumption) and do homework in class (active problem-solving with teacher support). The dev equivalent: agents handle rote implementation overnight (passive for you), and you spend work hours on architecture debates, code review, and unblocking ambiguity (active collaboration). This only works if your "lecture" (task description) is clear enough for async consumption—vague tickets kill the model.

The "Battle Scars" Section: What They Don't Tell You

Agent drift is real. If you queue 10 tasks and don't review incrementally, agents compound errors—task. You must implement review gates for progressing along the way.

Verification bandwidth becomes the bottleneck. Junior devs think agents will "free them up"—senior devs realize they're now doing 5x more code review. If your team can't review code faster than agents generate it, you've just moved the constraint.

Context switching destroys the gains. Reviewing agent work requires loading the entire task context into your head—possible usage of agentic orchatration platforms (e.g. agor) can assist in this task.

Conclusion: The Pragmatic Takeaway

The flipped development cycle works if—and only if—you treat agents as asynchronous team members with different strengths, not faster versions of yourself. Invest in task decomposition, observable outputs, and verification tooling for successful Agentic Engineering. Your daily standup should answer: "What did the agents attempt? What succeeded? What needs human steering?"

Notes:

  1. Some of the ideas for the posts are from Michael Kennedy It's not vibe coding: Agentic engineering
  2. The term "Agentic Engiennering" was possibly coined by Andrej Karpathy