Why I went anti-agile to run an agent team — and the four shifts I would make sooner if I did this again.

There is a reason that Boris Cherny — the engineer who built Claude Code at Anthropic — opens his official thirty-minute walkthrough not with a coding demo, but with a long detour through CLAUDE.md, shared project context, and "think before you code." There is a reason the same tool ships a built-in plan mode as a first-class feature, and that Anthropic's own best-practices guide tells you, in plain language, to write your project plan before your first plan-mode session — because the thirty minutes you spend writing it saves hours of plan corrections downstream. 1 2

That habit looks small. It isn't.…