I stopped asking my engineers for status updates. I just read their agent traces now.
Last September my head of engineering left. I didn't backfill the role and figured we didn't need one. That was a mistake. The engineering process slowly fell apart and I didn't notice until it was bad.
We migrated from Jira to Linear thinking a nicer UI would fix things. It didn't. Tried daily standups and engineers hated them because of timezone spread. Moved to every-other-day. Then async standups on Slack. None of it stuck.
I found myself pinging every dev individually for status updates. These are senior, 10x engineers. When they hit a blocker, they'd rather spend 3 hours solving it themselves than post in Slack.
They're also mostly unaware of what each other is working on. Everyone's burned out on Slack and meetings.
Like many orgs today, all of our devs use Claude Code. One of our strongest engineers told me straight up: "I'd rather collaborate with 6 Claude Code agents than coordinate with teammates."
I laughed, but he wasn't joking.
I thought about it, and a week ago we built an internal tool that logs traces from all our coding agents and creates a shared memory layer for all team members. The result surprised me.
It's not perfect and it's early, but it's the first thing that's actually reduced the communication tax instead of just reshuffling it.
For those of you managing teams that are deep into AI coding tools. how are you handling the coordination problem? Are agents changing how your team communicates, or is it still all Slack and standups?