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In what tech industry analysts are calling “the most predictable technological disruption since electricity replaced candles,” Instagram influencer and tech commentator Edward Honour has sparked a digital revolt against Scrum Masters with a viral video that essentially suggests using AI to automate away their jobs and “make them disappear.” The video, which has amassed over 12,000 likes and 330 increasingly mutinous comments, represents what anthropologists of corporate culture identify as the final stage of the Agile lifecycle: the violent overthrow of the methodology by the very software engineers it was supposed to liberate.
From Revolutionary Manifesto to Corporate Hostage Situation
To understand how we arrived at this breaking point, we must travel back to 2001, when 17 software developers gathered at a ski resort in Utah, in the US and created the Agile Manifesto – a revolutionary document that essentially said, “Maybe we should talk to customers sometimes and not plan software projects like we’re building the Hoover Dam.” These radical ideas – individuals over processes, working software over documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation – spread through the industry like wildfire, promising liberation from the tyranny of Waterfall development.
Fast forward to 2025, and what began as a revolutionary movement has completed its transformation into exactly what it sought to destroy. Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, have calcified into rigid bureaucratic structures that would make Soviet-era administrators weep with pride. Daily standups have become mandatory morning prayers where software engineers confess their software development sins. Sprint planning meetings consume more developer hours than actual development. Retrospectives have devolved into court-mandated therapy sessions where no one speaks their mind for fear of being labeled “not a team player.”
“The average software developer now spends 63% of their time in Agile ceremonies, 22% explaining to the Scrum Master why they’re behind on story points, and maybe 15% actually writing code if they’re lucky,” explains Dr. Isabella Efficiency, author of “Scrum: The Longest Way to Build Software Ever Invented.” “The ‘sprint’ name has become unintentionally ironic – like naming a tortoise ‘Speedy’.”
The Certification Industrial Complex
What truly transformed Agile from liberation movement to corporate hostage situation was the rise of what industry experts call the “Certification Industrial Complex” – a multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to stamping pieces of A4 paper that certify people who’ve never written a line of code as qualified to manage those who do.
The Professional Scrum Master certification, which can be obtained after a two-day workshop and a 60-minute test, has become the tech equivalent of a liberal arts degree – technically a credential but practically a warning sign. There are now over 40 different Agile-related certifications, including the Certified Agile Leadership-Enabled Transformation Enablement Orchestrator (CALETEO), which recipients proudly display on LinkedIn profiles as evidence of their ability to transform simple tasks into day-long workshops.
“The certification ecosystem has created a perfect storm,” notes agile historian Dr. Mark Methodology. “Companies want people with certifications, certification providers want to sell more certifications, and middle managers who don’t understand technology want simple metrics to justify their existence. Nobody involved in this system is incentivized to ask whether any of it actually results in better software.”
The Anti-Pattern Recognition Moment
The viral Instagram video that’s caused such a stir features Honour making a simple but devastating observation: if Agile and Scrum truly valued efficiency and automation, shouldn’t Scrum Masters themselves be automatable? After all, what could be more meta than using AI to automate the role that’s supposed to be improving efficiency?
This observation triggered what psychologists call “anti-pattern recognition” – the sudden, jarring realization that you’ve been participating in a system that contradicts its own principles. Agile, which touts “responding to change over following a plan,” has become a rigid set of ceremonies that must be followed regardless of their value. Scrum, which emphasizes self-organizing teams, has introduced a role specifically to organize the team from the outside.
The signs of this contradiction have been hiding in plain sight for years. According to the HackerNoon article “Scrum Master Anti-Patterns,” many Scrum Masters fall into behaviors like “pursuing flawed metrics” (tracking individual performance metrics to report to managers), “escalating under-performance” (reporting teams that won’t meet sprint commitments to higher levels), and “focusing on team harmony” (prioritizing good feelings over good software).
These behaviors transform the Scrum Master from servant-leader to corporate spy, collecting individual performance data despite Scrum’s emphasis on team accomplishment, and escalating “breaches” to management despite the methodology’s focus on self-organization.
The Non-Technical Hijacking
What makes Honour’s call for automation particularly resonant is his diagnosis of the problem: non-technical people have hijacked Agile methodologies, turning them from practical software development approaches into bureaucratic performance theater.
“The true fatal flaw of Agile wasn’t in the original concept,” explains Dr. Wei Process from the Institute of Methodology Studies. “It was in making it accessible enough that people who’ve never debugged at 2 AM could embrace it. Imagine if heart surgery techniques became so popular that accountants started performing them. That’s essentially what happened to Agile.”
This non-technical colonization explains why the comments on Honour’s video divide neatly into two camps: engineers energetically supporting the automation proposal, and Scrum Masters defending their role while simultaneously demonstrating they don’t understand what automation is.
“I’d love to see an AI try to facilitate a proper retrospective with emotional intelligence,” commented one Certified Scrum Professional, apparently unaware that AI models now write therapy sessions, movie scripts, and political speeches with emotional nuance that would make William Shakespeare weep with inadequacy.
The AI Salvation Fantasy
The darkest irony of the “automate the Scrum Master” movement is how perfectly it exemplifies the tech industry’s reflexive belief that technology can solve human problems – even problems created by previous technological “solutions.”
Honour’s follow-up video doubles down on this techno-solutionism with the advice: “Always try AI first. It’s not the early 2000s. You don’t get style points.” This philosophy – apply AI before considering whether a human approach might be better – epitomizes what sociologists call “the hammer fallacy.” When all you have is AI, everything looks like a task to be automated.
“We’re witnessing the perfect tech industry response to bureaucracy,” notes organizational psychologist Dr. Samantha Structure. “Rather than questioning why we implemented these processes in the first place, we’ll build increasingly complex technologies to automate the unnecessary processes we created. Then, when those technologies create new problems, we’ll build more technologies to solve those. It’s bureaucracy all the way down, just with better marketing.”
The Practical Automation Scenario
What would an automated Scrum Master actually look like? Based on the anti-patterns identified in industry literature, surprisingly implementable:
An AI could easily track story completion, calculate velocity, and generate those burndown charts that product owners glance at for approximately 1.7 seconds before asking why Feature X isn’t done yet. It could schedule and facilitate standups with timers that cut off anyone speaking longer than 60 seconds. It could generate retrospective summaries indistinguishable from the bland “we should communicate better” platitudes that currently cost companies $150,000+ per year.
In fact, the most challenging part of the Scrum Master role to automate might be the coffee ordering for meetings – though even that could likely be handled by a sufficiently sophisticated LLM connected to a corporate Starbucks MCP server.
“The truly terrifying realization isn’t that Scrum Masters could be automated,” whispers one senior engineer at a FAANG company who requested anonymity due to fear of being assigned extra story points. “It’s that in blind tests, most teams might not notice the difference. We’ve already dehumanized the role so much that replacing it with AI would be less ‘Terminator’ and more ‘fixing a typo’.”
The Management Karaoke Effect
The most scathing critique embedded in Honour’s viral call for automation is what it reveals about corporate management’s relationship with methodologies. Much like drunk executives performing karaoke, they know the words but not the music.
“Non-technical managers embraced Agile because it gave them the appearance of modern management without requiring them to actually cede control,” explains corporate anthropologist Dr. Jessica Organization. “They could talk about self-organizing teams while still demanding velocity metrics. They could praise iterative development while still requiring fixed deliverables by fixed dates. They could advocate customer collaboration while still refusing to let customers anywhere near the development process.”
This “Management Karaoke Effect” explains why so many Agile implementations fail despite the methodology’s sound principles. The words are right, but the tune is completely wrong.
In many organizations, Scrum has become what one anonymous software developer described as “waterfall with standup meetings” – all of the rigid planning of traditional project management but with added ceremonies that consume developer time without adding value.
The Circle of Methodological Life
What makes the current backlash particularly fascinating is how predictable it was. Technology methodologies follow a well-documented lifecycle:
First, they emerge as revolutionary grassroots movements opposed to corporate bureaucracy. Next, they gain popularity and become codified into trainings and certifications. Then, corporations adopt them, strip away anything challenging to management authority, and transform them into new bureaucracies. Finally, frustrated practitioners rebel, creating new grassroots methodologies promising liberation from bureaucracy – and the cycle begins anew.
We’ve seen this pattern with Structured Programming, Object-Oriented Programming, Service-Oriented Architecture, DevOps, and now Agile. Each revolution promises freedom from the tyranny of the previous revolution that failed to deliver on its promises.
“The half-life of a software development methodology is approximately 10 years,” notes technology historian Dr. Robert Evolution. “After that, the bureaucratic radiation becomes too toxic, and a new methodology must be born. We’re witnessing the final stages of Agile’s decay and the embryonic formation of whatever will replace it – probably something involving AI, given current trends.”
If Dr. Evolution is correct, we can expect the “AI-Driven Development Manifesto” to emerge sometime in late 2026, promising to free developers from the tyranny of human-led Agile processes.
The Final Retrospective
As we stand at what appears to be the twilight of the Agile era, it’s worth reflecting on what went wrong. The principles themselves remain sound: customer collaboration is valuable, responding to change is necessary, working software matters more than documentation. Where we went astray was in the implementation – turning flexible guidelines into rigid dogma, allowing non-technical managers to co-opt the language while ignoring the spirit, and creating a certification industry that values credentials over competence.
Honour’s call to automate Scrum Masters isn’t really about AI at all – it’s a cry of frustration from the technical heart of the industry, a recognition that something meant to make software development more humane has instead made it more bureaucratic. The enthusiasm for his message isn’t bloodthirstiness against Scrum Masters as individuals; it’s the pent-up rage of software engineers who’ve watched their craft being strangled by processes that were supposed to support it.
Perhaps the most fitting end to the Agile story would be for the software engineers themselves to reclaim it, embracing the original principles while jettisoning the ceremonies, certifications, and corporate modifications that have accumulated like barnacles on a once-sleek ship. Or perhaps it is time for something entirely new – not automated Scrum Masters, but a fundamental rethinking of how humans and technology collaborate to create software.
Either way, one thing is certain: the issue was never really about Scrum. It was about what happens when any methodology becomes more important than its purpose. As one comment on Honour’s video put it: “Agile is dead. Long live agility.”
Have you suffered through particularly pointless Agile ceremonies? Do you have a Scrum Master horror story that would make even the most hardened project manager weep? Or are you a Scrum Master who actually adds value and wants to defend your endangered species? Share your experiences in the comments below, but please keep it under two minutes as our AI timekeeper will cut you off.
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