Velocity was designed to answer one question: given what this team has delivered in recent sprints, how much should we expect it to deliver in the next one? It is a forecasting input, calibrated to a specific team’s specific definition of a story point. It is not a measure of productivity, engineering quality, team health, or business value delivered. Using it as any of those things produces outcomes that are reliably bad.

Velocity was always a flawed proxy for progress. Teams learned to game it, inflate it, and defend it in ways that had little to do with delivering value. AI-assisted development has not fixed the underlying problem — it has made it worse, and in doing so forced a more honest conversation about what sprint planning is actually for. When individual developer throughput increases significantly — and for many teams working with AI coding tools, the increase in raw output is real — the assumptions baked into story point estimation break down.