TL; DR: Quo Vadis, AI? — Food for Agile Thought #522
Welcome to the 522nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,812 peers. This week, Gary Marcus questions the viability of large language models, citing unresolved flaws such as hallucinations and weak reasoning — Quo Vadis AI? Teresa Torres and Petra Wille reflect on AI’s role in user interviews, warning that tech cannot replace skilled human insight, while Peter Yang sees the PM role in AI-native firms shifting toward builders who align quickly. Also, OpenRouter’s massive token data analysis reveals rising agentic use and open models, and Willem-Jan Ageling dissects why many corporate transformations still stall.
Next, Dave Baines urges product managers to stop hiding technical work and instead align it through transparency and joint prioritization. Chris Jones and Marty Cagan remind stakeholders that their job is not to demand features but to enable outcome-driven problem solving. Saffron Huang’s team finds Claude changes engineering workflows at Anthropic and raises career questions. Also, Teresa Torres shares 50 AI use cases from her own process, and Eric Barker recommends strategy over emotion when dealing with difficult coworkers.
Then, Jing Hu questions the true ROI of AI investments, citing McKinsey data showing limited gains and weak agent adoption. Mike Brock calls AGI from LLMs a flawed idea dressed as progress. Mike Fisher warns that chasing velocity without slack leads to chaos, Martin Eriksson urges teams to simplify decisions through focus and consent, and Andi Roberts challenges Tuckman’s model. Finally, John Cutler explains why tools fail when they don’t tackle underlying behavioral constraints.
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 521?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Quo Vadis AI?
: Three years on, ChatGPT still isn't what it was cracked up to be – and it probably never will be
Gary Marcus reviews ChatGPT’s three-year trajectory and argues that, despite massive investment and media hype, large language models have failed to solve core issues such as reasoning, hallucination, and adaptability, making them unlikely paths to AGI and unreliable foundations for sustained economic returns.
🎯 Product
: So What's Going to Happen to Product Management Anyway?
Peter Yang argues that while AI-native companies are hiring fewer PMs, the role is evolving into something faster, scrappier, and more rewarding for those who can build, align teams, and adapt relentlessly.
and : Customer Interview Analysis
Teresa Torres and Petra Wille revisit their skepticism toward AI‑assisted customer interview synthesis, sharing lessons from experiments and arguing that AI helps, but only when grounded in solid interviewing skills, and that human insight remains essential.
(via Hyperact): The tech debt elephant: A product perspective
Dave Baines explains how product managers can balance tech debt, architectural improvements, and product goals by building transparency, collaborating with tech leads, and applying structured prioritization rather than treating technical work as a hidden cost.
(via Silicon Valley Product Group): Stakeholders and the Product Model
Chris Jones and Marty Cagan describe how the product model expects stakeholders to share context, frame work as problems, and enable customer access so product teams can discover and deliver solutions that improve outcomes rather than ship features.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via OpenRouter): State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study
The authors analyze over 100 trillion real-world LLM tokens and find strong adoption of open-weight models, heavy use in creative roleplay and coding, rising agentic inference, and persistent early-user cohorts, which they call the Glass Slipper effect.
: Explain The McKinsey 2025 AI Report: Spending More On AI Makes You Twice As Likely To Fail (McKinsey's Own Data)
Jing Hu dissects McKinsey’s 2025 AI report and finds that spending more on AI does not guarantee success. Only 6% of companies see meaningful returns, and agent adoption remains surprisingly low across all functions.
: Why I’m Betting Against the AGI Hype
Mike Brock argues that AGI from LLMs is a philosophical misfire posing as engineering progress. He sees architectural flaws, compounding constraints, and a deep category error about intelligence, predicting the current AGI narrative will collapse under its own hype.
(via Anthropic): How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic
Saffron Huang and colleagues studied how AI is reshaping engineering at Anthropic, finding that Claude boosts productivity, broadens skills, and enables new kinds of work, while raising concerns about lost expertise, reduced mentoring, and long-term career uncertainty.
: How to Choose Which Tasks to Automate with AI (+50 Real Examples)
Teresa Torres shares how she built a personal AI-enhanced workflow using Claude Code, offering practical criteria and 50 real examples to help others decide what to automate, augment, or keep human.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: How Great Corporate Ambitions Die: 10 Transformation Mistakes
Willem-Jan Ageling outlines ten common reasons corporate transformations fail, from top-down control and ignored bottom-up input to lack of follow-up, impatience, and rewarding inertia instead of addressing resistant behavior.
: Everything New Has Bugs: Increasing velocity and quality
Mike Fisher explains why increasing velocity always introduces instability, arguing that sustainable speed depends on deliberate slack, strong ownership, and systems that absorb turbulence instead of mistaking chaos for progress.
: The Hard Thing About Decisions: Why Your Teams Are Struggling to Make Good Choices
Martin Eriksson explains why teams struggle with decision-making, citing overload, fatigue, and misalignment. He advocates for fewer, clearer choices grounded in consent, strategic focus, and a connected decision architecture.
📯 From Mechanical Ceremonies to Agile Conversations
Your Agile events aren't failing because people lack training. They're failing because your organization adopted the rituals while rejecting the transparency, trust, and adaptation that make them work. And often, the dysfunction of mechanical ceremonies isn't a bug. It's a feature.
Learn more: From Mechanical Ceremonies to Agile Conversations.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: How To Deal With Difficult People At Work: 4 Secrets From Experts
Eric Barker offers tactics for handling narcissists, drama seekers, bullies, and perfectionists at work by shifting from emotional reactions to strategic thinking, emphasizing self-discipline over wishful justice or performative outrage.
: Why Tuckman’s model may no longer serve 21st century teams
Tuckman’s linear team development model no longer fits today’s dynamic, distributed teams. This piece proposes five recurring movements—Aligning, Belonging, Co-Creating, Adapting, and Sustaining—as a more realistic pattern for modern collaboration.
: When (And How) Tools Matter
John Cutler explains how tools only help when they address the real blockers behind a behavior, showing why tool effectiveness depends on the behavior’s maturity and the constraints on its capability, opportunity, or motivation.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
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| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 February 3, 2026 | Guaranteed: Hands-on Agile #71: A3 Framework — Assist, Automate, Avoid — Let’s Build a Playbook! (English; Live Virtual Meetup) | Meetup | FREE |
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| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 19 to April 16, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #6 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 March 24-25, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
See all upcoming classes here.
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📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about Quo Vadis AI:
- Hands-on Agile #68: How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI.
- Fabrice Bernhard: The Lean Tech Manifesto.
- Maarten Dalmijn: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams.
- Roman Pichler: The Top Reasons Why a Product Strategy Fails.
- Johanna Rothman: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
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