AA247 - AI is a Poor Team-Player: Stanford's CooperBench Experiment
Wed Feb 04 2026
AI agents failed spectacularly at teamwork, performing ~50% worse than one solo agent!
This week, we're discussing Stanford’s CooperBench study (a benchmark, testing whether AI agents can collaborate on real coding tasks across Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust) and why AI-developer coordination collapses, even with a constant chat.
Listen or watch as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel dig into the methods and findings of Stanford’s 2026 CooperBench experiment and learn about the three capability gaps that caused these failures:
• Expectation Failures (42%): Agents ignored shared plans or misunderstood scope
• Commitment Failures (32%): Promised work was never completed
• Communication Failures (26%): Silence, spam, or hallucinations
The experiment's findings seem to confirm human-refined agile practices. The episode ends with a concrete call to action: stop treating AI as teammates. Use them as solo contributors. And if you must coordinate? Build working agreements, not handoffs.
This episode is for anyone navigating the AI hype cycle and wondering if swarms of agents are going to coordinate everyone out of a job!
#Agile #AI #ProductManagement
SOURCE
CooperBench: Benchmarking AI Agents' Cooperation (Stanford University & SAP Labs US)
https://cooperbench.com/
https://cooperbench.com/static/pdfs/main.pdf
LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)
More
AI agents failed spectacularly at teamwork, performing ~50% worse than one solo agent! This week, we're discussing Stanford’s CooperBench study (a benchmark, testing whether AI agents can collaborate on real coding tasks across Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust) and why AI-developer coordination collapses, even with a constant chat. Listen or watch as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel dig into the methods and findings of Stanford’s 2026 CooperBench experiment and learn about the three capability gaps that caused these failures: • Expectation Failures (42%): Agents ignored shared plans or misunderstood scope • Commitment Failures (32%): Promised work was never completed • Communication Failures (26%): Silence, spam, or hallucinations The experiment's findings seem to confirm human-refined agile practices. The episode ends with a concrete call to action: stop treating AI as teammates. Use them as solo contributors. And if you must coordinate? Build working agreements, not handoffs. This episode is for anyone navigating the AI hype cycle and wondering if swarms of agents are going to coordinate everyone out of a job! #Agile #AI #ProductManagement SOURCE CooperBench: Benchmarking AI Agents' Cooperation (Stanford University & SAP Labs US) https://cooperbench.com/ https://cooperbench.com/static/pdfs/main.pdf LINKS YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596 INTRO MUSIC Toronto Is My Beat By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181) CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)