0001 — Shape Up over Scrum for solo + AI development
Architecture Decision Record.
Status
Accepted
Date: 2026-05-28
Context
This scaffold’s primary developer is one person, sometimes working with Claude
Code sub-agents (prometeo, forja, centinela). The Inceptor workflow already in
place — issue → PR → merge, orchestrated by the main Claude Code session — needs a cadence
framework on top of it.
Scrum requires team ceremonies (standups, sprint reviews, retros with peers) that don’t function with N=1. Shape Up (Basecamp, 2019) was designed for small teams running fixed-time-variable-scope cycles. Its primitives translate cleanly to solo + AI work.
Alternatives considered:
- Scrum-lite (no standups, but keep sprints + retros) — still ceremony for one person; sprints encourage fixed-scope which fights well with AI-assisted velocity variance
- Kanban — no cadence at all; loses the “appetite” discipline that prevents scope creep
- Ad-hoc — what we’d been doing; degraded into the 17-item deferred backlog the integration shipped with
Decision
Use Shape Up’s cadence primitives:
| Shape Up | This repo |
|---|---|
| Pitch | A written issue spec — INTEGRATION-PLAN.md entries or .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ forms |
| Appetite | Phase or milestone (fixed time, variable scope) |
| Betting table | Monday ritual — pick the next pitch, hand the scope to Claude Code |
| Cycle | The phase duration |
| Cooldown | 2-day gap after each phase for docs, refactors, dep bumps, debt |
Agile Manifesto values stay as taste guiding choices, not ceremonies on a calendar.
Standups, sprint reviews, sprint retros are dropped. Lessons-learned go to
docs/lessons.md only when centinela rejects the same issue twice in a row
— specific trigger, low overhead.
Full framework: docs/PRINCIPLES.md §1.
Consequences
Positive:
- Zero ceremony overhead for solo work
- Pitches force explicit appetite + boundaries up front (better than open-ended sprints)
- Cooldown gives explicit space for non-feature work (the 17 deferred items from prior phases live there)
- Cleanly maps onto the sub-agent roles already in place
Negative:
- “Betting table” with one person is a self-discipline ritual, easily skipped
- No retro cadence means lessons can be forgotten — mitigated by the rejection-trigger rule, but not perfectly
Neutral:
- Sub-agents (prometeo / forja / centinela) absorb roles that would otherwise be PO / dev / QA — Shape Up doesn’t prescribe these roles, so the mapping is clean and unforced
Supersedes
None — first methodology ADR.
References
- Singer, R. (2019). Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters. Basecamp.
- Beck, K. et al. (2001). Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
- Schwaber, K. & Sutherland, J. (2020). The Scrum Guide.