Were the intense daily meetings any help? I can imagine that if there's a ticket to be solved, and I can talk about the problem for 40 minutes to more experienced coworkers, that actually speeds up the necessary dev time by quite a lot.
Of course, it will probably just devolve into a disengaged group of people that read emails or Slack in another window, so there's that.
Not really. It was mostly about tests. Officially, I was a developer for the team (longest one on the team). Unofficially I was QA, as our new manager shut out QA entirely [1] and I became the "go-to" person for tests. Never a question about how the system worked as a whole, just test test tests testing tests tests write the new tests did you write the new tests how do we run the tests aaaaaaaaaaah! Never mind that I thought I had a simple test harness set up, nope. They were completely baffled by the thought of automation it seems.
[1] "Because I don't want them to be biased by knowing the implementation when testing" but in reality, quality went to hell.
Of course, it will probably just devolve into a disengaged group of people that read emails or Slack in another window, so there's that.