Agents Don't Do Standups: Building the Post-Engineer Engineering Org — Mike Spitz, PFF

PFF ran a three-month case study: two engineers against a team of ten, same codebase, same customers. The two shipped five times a day. The ten shipped once every five days. Output measured by ticket complexity came out at 10x. Customer satisfaction went up, not down. Mike Spitz, their CTO, started with one reframe: stop asking how to help engineers go faster and ask how to make the agents faster instead. The talk covers what that reframe actually dismantled. Standups went away because tickets auto-update from PR state. Sprint planning went away because estimates are irrelevant when the bottleneck is no longer human. Code review got split: agents handle style and naming, engineers handle system design. The spec to lightweight design doc to auto-generated ticket to PR flow replaced most of the coordination overhead entirely. What survived is a short huddle every other day, a strong opinion about which engineers thrive in this setup, and a QA agent that spins up on staging after every merge and checks acceptance criteria against the ticket. Speaker info: - https://x.com/mikespitz_uk - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-spitz-89741243/