Why Do We Still Use Sprints in Software Development?

For a long time, sprints existed for a very specific reason: execution was slow, uncertain, and expensive. Writing code took time, integration was painful, and feedback loops were long. A two-week sprint gave teams a shared cadence to plan, commit, and recover when estimates were wrong. It was a pragmatic response to the realities of software development at the time.

That reality is changing.

With modern AI agents, the act of coding is no longer the dominant bottleneck for many teams. Features that once took weeks can now be implemented in a day, sometimes in hours. Iteration is cheap. Refactoring is easier. Tests and scaffolding are generated quickly. The mechanics of execution have compressed dramatically.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: if execution is no longer the bottleneck, what are sprints actually for?

When teams keep two-week sprints unchanged in this new environment, the extra time rarely disappears. It gets absorbed elsewhere. People wait for reviews or decisions. Work is over-polished because there is no new unit of commitment yet. Context switching increases as developers pull in side tasks to stay busy. None of this is malicious. It is simply what happens when a process designed to pace slow execution is applied to fast execution.

The truth is that most teams today do not need sprints to manage coding speed. They still need them to manage other things. Decision-making. Cross-team coordination. Risk. Integration. Quality. Alignment with stakeholders. These problems have not gone away, and in some cases they have become more visible precisely because execution is faster.

Seen through this lens, sprints should no longer be treated as delivery containers. They should be treated as decision and alignment cadences. A sprint becomes the place where intent is clarified, constraints are defined, tradeoffs are resolved, and review checkpoints are agreed upon. Execution can then flow continuously inside those boundaries, rather than being artificially batched.

This shift also changes what “productive time” looks like. When code can be produced quickly, the highest leverage work is no longer typing faster. It is framing the right problems, defining stable interfaces, reviewing and integrating others’ work, reducing future friction through better architecture, and helping the system move faster as a whole. If teams do not explicitly value this work, they will unintentionally waste time filling the gaps left by faster execution.

So the real question is not whether sprints are obsolete. It is whether we are honest about the problem they are solving today. If we continue to use sprints as a throttle on execution when execution is no longer slow, we create friction by design. If we instead redefine sprints around decisions, risk, and alignment, they can remain useful even as the mechanics of software development change.

I’m genuinely curious how other teams are handling this transition. If execution is no longer the bottleneck in your environment, what do you still use sprints for?