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Coffee With Developers • Jun 1, 2026

25 Years After Agile, And Yet We're Building Waterfall Agents - Martin Hynie

Martin Hynie

Martin Hynie warns that modern AI agents have regressed into rigid waterfall workflows. They blindly pursue flawed logic. Discover how ritualized dissent forces these autonomous systems to self-correct.

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#1 about 2 min

Background and career journey in regulated software systems

Transitioning from highly regulated environments to fintech provided a fresh perspective on quality and compliance in software engineering.

#2 about 4 min

How AI agents replicate waterfall instead of agile development

Current agentic workflows execute long-running tasks linearly rather than continually revisiting underlying strategic assumptions.

#3 about 4 min

The limitations of vibe coding and agentic strategy iteration

Rapidly generating and discarding code highlights the failure of current agents to fundamentally rethink flawed initial strategies.

#4 about 9 min

Designing AI agents to exercise doubt and evaluate risks

High-stakes applications require autonomous systems that log their chain of thought and recognize when to pause and reevaluate their approach.

#5 about 7 min

Triggering strategic resets for long-running autonomous tasks

Tracking initial assumptions against discovered knowledge enables agents to restart complex tasks with better-informed baseline strategies.

#6 about 5 min

Overcoming the sunk cost fallacy in software generation

Autonomous agents can discard failed work and restart tasks without experiencing the frustration or ego constraints of human developers.

#7 about 7 min

How AI tools alter developer hiring and architectural design

Lowering the barrier to entry for coding shifts the engineering focus toward architectural expertise and problem recognition over syntax recall.

#8 about 3 min

Publishing research and speaking at tech conferences

Reengaging with the developer community involves sharing new frameworks and proving concepts within live startup environments.

Matching moments

2:34 min

Balancing developer autonomy with the adoption of coding agents

Clemens Wasner Clemens Wasner +4 · World Congress 2026 Europe

3:56 min

The evolution of AI programming and agentic workflows

Fabian Hedin Fabian Hedin · World Congress 2026 Europe

3:33 min

Navigating developer bottlenecks and human accountability

Werner Vogels Werner Vogels +1 · World Congress 2026 Europe

4:08 min

Transitioning software engineering teams to AI-native development workflows

Florian Deter Florian Deter +4 · World Congress 2026 Europe

2:06 min

Rethinking team structures around AI agent capabilities

Mike Mike · World Congress 2025

8:54 min

Preserving engineering fundamentals in agentic development

Chris Heilmann +1 · LIVE

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Upcoming sessions on this topic

Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Agentic Drift: keeping pace with your agents

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Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

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Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

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Developer Experience Manager at Eventual

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Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

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Chief Technology Officer, Nephos

Tomislav Tipurić
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

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Simon Auer

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