The 3-Check
source, authority, own-eyes
agiletoai · a field guide to the instruments
For people who already deliver in Agile, and now have AI in the room. Everything else changes by the quarter.
Agile didn’t expire when AI showed up. It became load-bearing.
The terms
- What
- Ten instruments. Things you run, not things you agree with.
- Who
- Six you can run on your own. Four need a room.
- Price
- None to read the method. The instrument sheets ask for one email; nothing else does.
- Length
- About four minutes to your first result.
Every fixture on this line was added the day something went wrong.
What carries over
Agile’s canon was harvested, not designed
Planning Poker was invented mid-session in 2002, because one senior voice was anchoring every estimate; the fix was to make everyone reveal at once. Story points emerged because “ideal days” kept being heard as commitments. The retrospective was a long-form practice teams compressed into an hour. The standup stood up because standing kept it short, and it stayed.
Not one shipped as a designed product. Each was a fix for one specific room that turned out to travel, got a name, and got adopted.
AI is a new era of work. Same move, new mechanics — and the mechanics are the part nobody has named yet.
Already in the bucket, before anyone types
- 01
- The model's own instructions
- 02
- Its guardrails
- 03
- Its tools
- 04
- Your institution's policy layer
Context, and how it is quietly lost
Nothing in the output looks any different
This is the failure sequence. It has three stages, it never announces itself, and the team’s confidence rises through all three.
- 1You overfill it. More documents, more history, more instructions. It never says stop — it keeps asking for more.
- 2It compacts. To make room it squashes what is already there. Fidelity you loaded is quietly lost. This is context rot.
- 3Quality erodes. Everything produced after that is compromised — and nothing in the output looks any different.
The failure mode to remember: your team believes the system knows everything they told it about how you work — long after it stopped remembering.
Keeper · 01Access is not attention.
The curated bucket beats the full bucket, every time. And deciding what goes in is not a technical skill — it is judgment, and it belongs to your people. The tools are trained on the general case; you are not the general case.
Start here
Which of these is closest to your week?
1“I use it. Nothing sticks — every conversation starts from zero.”15 minon your ownnothing to installFind your rung2“My team uses it. I can’t tell whether it’s working.”4 minon your ownsaves to this device onlyScore your nine principles3“I’m asked why we aren’t moving faster — and why that shipped.”10 minon your ownneeds your scorecardThe pace you can defend
There is no shame anywhere on this ladder. Most people live on rung one. You only need to climb one.
At your desk
Six you can run at your desk
Nobody else needs to be in the room.
Find Your Rung
locate yourself, then take one step
The Outcome Test
one sentence, completed out loud
The Counterfeit Test
could a team satisfy this, and produce nothing?
The Three Verification Questions
asked of any AI-produced assessment
The Pace Script
three sentences, filled from the scorecard
In a room
Four that need other people in the room
Bring a table, a wall, or a handful of colleagues.
The Scorecard
nine principles, scored one to five
What Goes In
curating context under a hard constraint
Name Which One It Was
one post-mortem, sorted into three failure modes
Ten Steps to Three
a workflow redesigned from the outcome backward
What has to stay true
Five values sit under the instruments, written the week two frontier models were withdrawn without notice: human accountability, verification rituals, boundary craft, documented intent, trust-paced adoption. Each is stated the same way, as what to optimize for first and what still matters even when the other side is tempting. The five in full, with the dated entries behind them, are on the method page.
What earns a card
The catalog is the harvest, happening now
These ten came out of rooms, not out of a design session. Three rooms is the bar: a mechanic earns a card once it has worked in three, and the ones that don’t survive contact get cut rather than defended. That is why the count is ten and not forty, and why it is free. Run one this week, against something real.
AI Mechanic · Level 1 — not open, no date