Sprint Discipline for AI-Augmented Work: Skipjack Made Operational

Agile Scrum's three pillars — transparency, inspection, adaptation — face three operationally consequential failure modes when teams add agentic execution at production cadence: milestone-density mismatch, per-milestone signal loss, and scope-change-protocol bandwidth deficit. This paper specifies four operational refinements that make Skipjack doctrine survive contact with production sprint discipline: milestone-locked cadence, the inject vocabulary with mandatory accounting, the no-orphan-tasks contract, and master-stamps-last role ordering. The compatibilist framing closes the argument: these are not AI-containment mechanisms; they are coordination-structure refinements within which both human creation and AI execution thrive.

This is Paper Eight of the Managing Agentics Ops decalogy.