Happy 25th Birthday, Agile!

This month is the 25th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, my LinkedIn feed is full of birthday posts from the people who built the certification industry around it. The pattern is remarkable: everyone acknowledges what went wrong, nobody stops doing it. So here's the version nobody asked for. From someone who spent 25 years building banking systems while Agile happened around me. The manifesto was never the problem Four values. 68 words. Written at a ski lodge in Utah by people who actually built software. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan. That was it. And for about 18 months, it gave teams permission to do what they already knew was right: stop pretending that documentation was more important than shipping. Then the industry arrived. How 68 words became a billion-dollar machine If "interactions" mattered, you needed some