Why Daily Standups Are Becoming Useless in the AI Era

Daily standups were supposed to improve coordination. In practice, they often became a ritual that burns engineering time without giving much back. The old 15-minute promise sounds harmless, but in most real teams it becomes 30 minutes, 1 hour, or even 1 hour 30 minutes once the conversation starts and people wait their turn. Strictly speaking, "daily" is the cadence and "standup" is the ceremony. In practice, people just use "daily" as shorthand for the meeting itself. That is where the math gets ugly. Why it used to make sense Standups were useful when teams had poor visibility and weak async tooling. They helped surface blockers, expose dependencies, and give managers a quick snapshot of progress. The problem is that many companies kept the ceremony long after the reason for it weakened. Today, engineers already have: ticket boards pull request summaries commit history Slack updates AI-generated status recaps If the status already exists in the system of record, forcing the whole te