Agentile

The Manifesto

We are building software in an age where agents write much of the code. Agile taught us to favour short loops, working software, and responding to change. That spirit still holds — but the team has changed. Now humans and agents build together.

When we automated the building, review became the bottleneck. Then review could be automated too. What is left — the thing that is now hardest, and matters most — is describing what we actually want. As the building becomes automatic, what you ask for becomes the most important.

Be careful what you wish for — a vague wish, faithfully built, is still the wrong thing. And careful not to wish for too little: when building is so cheap, asking for less than you want is the costly mistake. Be precise, and be ambitious.

We have come to value

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The principles behind it

1. 1

   Put care into the ask. Saying exactly what you want is the hardest, most valuable thing — and it decides everything downstream. Capture, shape, prioritise, and plan exist to get the ask right before anything is built: precise, and not too modest.

2. 2

   Small asks, one trunk. The unit of work is what you ask for; keep each ask small and specific, and integrate continuously to one mainline. Small asks make small diffs — reviewable by a person or an agent, and safe to land even when many work at once.

3. 3

   The spec is the unit of work; capture is free. Ideas enter as one-line stubs with zero ceremony. Nothing is built without a shaped spec.

4. 4

   Stages are yours to define. Agentile defines the loop and what the stages are; what each stage contains is yours to define. An implementation gives you a way to tailor or replace any stage — but that mechanism is the tool's, not the methodology's.

5. 5

   Context is infrastructure. Decisions, conventions, and domain rules live where every agent reads them, versioned with the code.

6. 6

   Reduce agency with determinism. Agents get judgement where it matters; anything you would repeat — build, test, scan, deploy — runs as a deterministic gate, never a request in prose.

7. 7

   A fresh reviewer beats a confident author. Agents find others' mistakes better than their own. Nothing merges unverified.

8. 8

   Accountability stays human. Agents draft, plan, build, and review; a named person approves the plan and signs off before anything ships.

9. 9

   The loop learns. Each cycle encodes its lessons, so the next one is cheaper.

First be agile, then agentic. Get the trunk, the gates, and the written spec right first — agents make a good loop fast, not a bad loop safe.