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"Working software is the primary measure of progress." That is from the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Not points, not velocity, not the area under a burndown curve. Somewhere in the last two decades a great many teams swapped the measure for the proxy.

It held up while building was slow enough that effort and progress looked roughly the same from a distance. Agents have pulled them apart. Ask how a story point is supposed to map onto the tokens an agent burns through, and the question answers itself.

So what does velocity measure in an agentic team? At best, nothing useful. At worst, spend: the team closing the most points is often just the team with the largest inference budget. You are left holding a chart that tracks your model bill.

Sprints survive, because a regular boundary to stop and steer is useful for reasons that have nothing to do with points. The question at that boundary changes, from how many points we closed to how close we are to shipping something useful. And retros matter more than ever.