Starting April 19, the price of the Meta Quest 3S (128GB) and Meta Quest 3S (256GB) will go up by $50 to $349.99 and $449.99, respectively. The price of the Meta Quest 3 is going up by $100 to $599.99.

The following article was originally published on Tim O’Brien’s Medium page and is being reposted here with the author’s permission.

If you’ve spent any time around AI-assisted software work, you already know the moment when the Scope Creep Kraken first puts a tentacle on the boat.

The project begins with a real goal and, usually, a sensible one. Build the internal tool. Clean up the reporting flow. Add the missing admin screen. Then someone discovers that the model can generate a Swift application in minutes to render this on an iPhone, and the mood in the room changes.

“Why not? We can render this on an iOS application, and it will only take 10 minutes. Go for it. These tools are amazing. Wow.”

That first idea is often genuinely useful. Something that might have taken a week now takes an hour. That is part of what makes the pattern so seductive. It doesn’t begin with incompetence. It begins with tool-driven momentum.

The meeting continues, “Let’s put the entire year’s backlog into the system and see if we can get this all done in a week. Ignore the token spend limits, let’s just get this done.” What was a reasonable weekly release meeting has now set the stage for a rapid expansion in scope, and that’s how the Scope Creep Kraken takes over.

Scope creep is older than AI, of course. Software teams have been haunted by “while we’re at it” long before anybody was pasting stack traces into a chat window. What AI changed was the rate of growth. In the old version of this problem, extra scope still had to fight its way through staffing constraints. Somebody had to build the feature, debug it, test it, and explain why it belonged. That friction was often the only thing standing between a focused project and an over-extended team.

AI broke that.

Now the extra feature often arrives with a demo attached. “Could we add multi-language support?” Forty-five seconds later, there is a branch. “What about generated documentation?” Sure, why not? “Could the CLI accept natural language commands?” The model appears optimistic, which is enough to make the whole thing sound temporarily reasonable. Each addition looks manageable in isolation. That is how the Kraken works. It does not attack all at once. It wraps around the project one small grip at a time.

Signs the Kraken is already on your boat

• Features appearing without a ticket
• Branches nobody asked for
• Demos replacing design decisions
• “It only took the model 30 seconds.”

The part I keep seeing on teams is not reckless ambition so much as confident improvisation. People are reacting to real capability. They are not wrong to be excited that so much is suddenly possible.

The trouble starts when “we can generate this quickly” quietly replaces “we decided this belongs in the project.” Those are not the same sentence.

For a while, the Kraken even looks helpful. Output goes up. Screens appear. Branches multiply. People feel productive, and sometimes they really are productive in the narrow local sense. What gets hidden in that burst of visible progress is integration cost. Every tentacle has to be tested with every other tentacle. Every generated convenience becomes a maintenance obligation. Every small addition pulls the project a little farther from the problem it originally set out to solve.

The product manager might chime in, “A mobile application? I didn’t ask for that, but I guess it’s good. We’ll see. Who’s going to review this with the customer?”

That is usually when the team realizes the Kraken is already on the boat. The original sponsor asked for a hammer and is now watching a Swiss Army knife unfold in real time, with several blades no one asked for and at least one that does not seem to fold back in properly.

AI also makes it dangerously easy to confuse demonstrations with decisions.

The useful response is not to become suspicious of every experiment. Some of the first tentacles are worth keeping. The response is to put the old discipline back where AI made it easy to remove. Keep a written scope. Treat additions as actual decisions rather than prompt side effects. Ask what each new feature does to testing, documentation, support, and the team’s ability to explain the system six months from now. If nobody can answer those questions, the feature is not “done” just because the model produced a convincing draft.

What makes the Scope Creep Kraken a good name is one that teams can use in the moment. Once people can say, “This is another tentacle,” the conversation gets clearer. You are no longer arguing about whether the idea is clever. You are asking whether this is motivated by a requirement or a capability.

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Efe Gümüs: Success as a Scrum Master Means People Feel Safe Enough to Speak Up Before It's Too Late

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

 

"The healthier your collaboration with other roles — developers, product owners, managers — the more successful as a Scrum Master you are." - Efe Gümüs

 

Efe defines Scrum Master success not through team velocity or timely deliveries, but through the health of relationships. A successful Scrum Master actively contributes to organizational matters, increases transparency on both problems and solutions, and bridges the gap between roles. At the team level, the signal is clear: if people feel safe enough to approach you with their problems, if they speak freely in team events without fear of blame, if they can raise risks before the last day of the sprint — that's success. But Efe is honest about how hard this is to maintain. Relationships with stakeholders have constant ups and downs, and the work of understanding people never stops. His advice starts with empathy — not just reading the room in the moment, but understanding that every colleague carries a different career history, different coping mechanisms, and different experiences that shape how they react to change. For younger Scrum Masters especially, Efe emphasizes that what worked for you won't work for everyone. Speak the common language, understand their perspective, give them assurance through visible, outcome-focused progress. The health of those relationships is the measure of your impact.

 

Self-reflection Question: Beyond metrics and deliverables, how would you describe the health of your relationship with the key stakeholders around your team — and what's one thing you could do this week to strengthen the weakest one?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Diamond Retrospective

"When you have diverse perspectives, a growth zone, converged thinking, and then action points — that diamond — people actually own the actions." - Efe Gümüs

 

Efe doesn't name a single retrospective format as his favorite — instead, he describes the structure that makes any retrospective effective: the diamond. Start by opening up diverse perspectives (diverge), create space for exploration and growth (the growth zone), then converge the thinking toward clear action points. This diamond pattern — diverge, explore, converge, act — ensures that the team moves from broad reflection to specific, owned commitments. The key word is "owned": when people arrive at actions through this structured exploration rather than being told what to improve, they commit to the follow-through. Efe connects this directly to his broader philosophy: the best systems don't depend on any single person, and the best retrospectives produce actions that the team drives forward without needing the Scrum Master to push.

 

[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥

Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.

 

🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

 

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[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

 

About Efe Gümüs

 

Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.

 

You can link with Efe Gümüs on LinkedIn.

Download audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scrummastertoolbox/20260416_Efe_Gumus_Thu.mp3?dest-id=246429

The Android team has published an official repository of Agent Skills for Android development. The new android/skills repository is hosted under the official Android GitHub organization, and Android describes these skills as modular instructions and resources that help LLMs better understand and execute Android specific tasks according to best practices.

The github repo:
https://github.com/android/skills

The repository already shows the kind of workflows Android wants to support. Its current structure includes skills for AGP 9 upgrade work, XML Views to Jetpack Compose migration, Navigation 3, R8 analysis, Play Billing version upgrades, and edge to edge support. That makes the repository more than a generic demo. It is an initial curated set of focused Android engineering workflows.