We fixed every other meeting problem. Why not stand-ups?
Most teams hate standup meetings but keep doing them anyway. We used AI to capture our work automatically and skip the meeting entirely. Here's how it works.
It's wild how we can collectively complain about the same broken process and still show up to it every single day.
Think about it, five years of daily stand-ups, recycling the same complaints, just packaged in different words. We’ve reinvented every other broken meeting: we have Slack for async conversations, Asana for visual progress tracking, and tools like Granola that turn discussions into actionable summaries.
And yet… the stand-up survives.
Despite the workshops, retros, tons of research, and "10 Ways to Fix Your Stand-ups" – nothing really changes.
Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Maybe the problem isn't the format. Maybe it's that we're performing productivity instead of capturing it.
The performative burnout we're all living
Let’s start with something every major study mentions, since understanding how we got here might reveal a deeper layer of the problem. I call it performative burnout.
It's the tired feeling that keeps us stuck doing the same show every day, with daily stand-ups being the biggest example.
We've created this weird story where stand-ups are both the worst part of everyone's day AND somehow totally necessary to keep everything from falling apart. It's like they've become the unbreakable rule of the tech world – can't touch them, can't question them, and everyone hates them.
Sure, some people really believe their daily reports help their relationships with bosses and get promoted. And maybe for some people, that's true. But here's what I think is really happening: we've talked ourselves into believing that spending our mornings explaining what we did yesterday somehow counts as building something important.
It doesn't.
Our own team hit that point where we couldn't ignore how crazy this was. Here we were, building Pieces to help people work without interruptions, something that is soo completely different than ChatGPT, Perxplexity, and Claude together.
Yet, here we are, our own stand-ups were making everyone feel miserable.
So we did what any self-respecting productivity company would do – we automated it.
How we automated stand-ups
First things first, we stopped just complaining about stand-ups and started treating them like a puzzle to solve.
The more we dug into what was frustrating everyone, the more we realized that each team member had developed their own relationship with stand-up:
Antreas, our ML research scientist, located in the EU, put it perfectly:
Brian just cut straight to it:
After weeks of team meetings, writing down every problem, and pushing through dozens of fixes and updates…
We finally released the daily stand-up feature. And here's the best part — we immediately started using it ourselves to fix the exact stand-up problems that had been driving us crazy.
Here's how you can use it to turn your chaotic stand-up into an actual, useful update:
Step 1: Activate Long-Term Memory to capture your work.
Step 2: Let Pieces track your work across all tools automatically.
Step 3: Generate your stand-up update with a simple prompt.
Step 4: Click on the Power Menu and Go to the Workstream Activity.
Step 5: Share contextual updates that actually matter.
Instead of fifteen minutes of “performance art”, you get real information in under a minute, and nobody has to pretend yesterday's ticket was somehow useful.
Why is it different from any other solutions on the market?
Here's the thing other solutions miss: they're all trying to make meetings better instead of asking whether you need the meeting at all.
They all optimize for better reporting. Pieces eliminates the need to report.
Think about it: Antreas doesn't need to tell you he's debugging the ML pipeline if Pieces already captured his Git commits, Stack Overflow searches, and the Slack thread where he figured out the solution.
Brian doesn't need to spend 30 minutes listening to everyone's to-do lists when he can ask Pieces to come up with an agenda, after asking "What blockers came up this week?" and get actual context, not performance.
Other AI tools ask: "How can we make this meeting more efficient?".
Pieces asks: "What if the work already told the story?".
Your Git commits know what you built. Your Slack messages know where you got stuck. Your code changes know what you're debugging. The information already exists, scattered across a dozen tools, waiting for an AI that actually understands your workflow to connect the dots.
Stop waiting. Let Pieces connect those dots for you, try it free, and see what your work has been trying to tell you all along.
References
Frisch, B. (2016). “Stand-Up Meetings Don’t Work for Everybody.” Harvard Business Review – Highlighting physical and one-size-fits-all issues with daily stand-ups vdoc.pubvdoc.pubvdoc.pub.
Stray, V. et al. (2017). “Are Daily Stand-up Meetings Valuable? A Survey of Developers in Software Teams.” – Survey of 221 developers (87% use standups) found juniors most positive and seniors/large-team members most negative about standups researchgate.net.
Lew, C. (2020). “It’s time to kill the daily stand-up meeting.” Canopy blog – Critique of bloated standups and context-switching costs; suggests async updates canopy.iscanopy.is.
Davide de Paolis (2021). “Daily Standup Meetings are useless.” DEV Community – Describes useless standups that merely repeat Jira status, with team members zoning out dev.todev.to.
Reddit r/ExperiencedDevs (2019). “Why do people hate daily standups?” – Thread of tech worker opinions; notes on standups as “justify your job” rituals and issues in large teams reddit.comreddit.com.
“The Psychology of Pointless Meetings” (Nir Eyal, 2023) – Psychology Today – Discusses how unnecessary meetings drain morale and productivity; notes lost focus time around meetings psychologytoday.com.
Tsipursky, G. (2024). “Is Surveillance Sabotaging Worker Productivity?” – Psychology Today – Glassdoor survey: 41% feel less productive under monitoring; highlights trust over surveillance psychologytoday.com.
Accountemps via Morrison, D. (2023). Micromanagement in the C-Suite – Cites 59% have had a micromanager; 68% report morale decline and 55% productivity decline under micromanagement elrexecutive.com.au.
Gallup (2020). “Ultimate Guide to Micromanagers.” – Describes negative outcomes of micromanaged teams (fear, paralysis, dishonesty) gallup.com.
PPM Express Blog (2023). “Context Switching and the Benefits of Deep Focus.” – Aggregates research on multitasking costs: up to 40% productivity loss, 20+ minutes to refocus, 45% of employees say context switching hurts output ppm.expressppm.express.
Atlassian Work Life (2024). “State of Teams 2024.” – Notes teams with better practices engage in less “productivity theater” and that poor meeting cultures lead to more time wasted atlassian.comatlassian.com.
Medium (Maxime, 2025). “We Have a Daily Standup. Nobody Stands. Nothing’s Up.” – A tech lead’s satirical take on the modern standup’s emptiness medium.com, contrasting it with the earlier days of energetic in-person standups.
