Matthew Cullum, VP of Engineering at thatDot Inc., published a proposed addendum to the Agile Manifesto on March 13, 2026, arguing that AI-assisted code generation has invalidated a foundational assumption of Agile methodology: that working software is evidence of team comprehension. The addendum, hosted on GitHub, introduces four new value priorities — shared understanding over working software, independent challenge over efficient agreement, teaching the why over delivering the what, and pace of learning over pace of shipping. Cullum, who brings twenty years of software engineering leadership to the proposal, grounds his argument in the practical observation that because <a href="/news/2026-03-14-ai-did-not-simplify-software-engineering">AI can now generate functional code</a> without the team understanding what was built, traditional Agile proxy metrics are no longer reliable indicators of a team's ability to maintain or adapt its systems.
Beyond the four new values, Cullum proposes refinements to three of the original twelve Agile principles. Principle 3 is updated to require that software not be delivered faster than it can be deeply understood. Principle 7 is revised so that <a href="/news/2026-03-14-spec-driven-verification-claude-code-agents">shared understanding, demonstrated through software the team can explain</a>, replaces working software alone as the primary measure of progress. Principle 8 is extended to recognize that burnout can stem not just from overwork but from the cognitive burden of maintaining code nobody on the team comprehends. The proposal draws a through-line from the 2001 manifesto's original emphasis on individuals and interactions to a new emphasis on what those individuals actually understand about what they have built.
Cullum works at thatDot Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based company founded in 2019 from a DARPA-funded project on advanced persistent threat detection and backed by In-Q-Tel and the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. Its flagship product, Quine, is built around a streaming graph architecture designed to make data relationships explicit and inspectable. In high-assurance cybersecurity environments, opaque outputs are liabilities, which gives his argument practical grounding that a pure engineering-culture critique would lack.
The Hacker News discussion surfaced both historical precedent and pointed skepticism. Commenter svilen_dobrev drew a parallel to Alistair Cockburn's 2004 paper framing software development as an information-flow cooperative game, anticipating Cullum's emphasis on shared understanding by more than two decades. The most direct pushback came from stevenalowe, who argued the proposal inverts the primary obligation of any programming job: elevating team learning above delivering working software would simply get developers fired. Cullum has not yet responded publicly to that challenge.