In my team it is okay to just say "no update". We don't do dailies to justify that we aren't slacking off. Everybody trusts everybody else that they put in the work.
Daily stand-ups are for coordinating with the other devs. E.g. "It will take a couple extra days to do this backend API that you are waiting for", "I'm a bit stuck, anybody will have free time today to pair program?", "Who is able to drop their low priority task so that the high priority one gets done on time?"
If you're on track and don't neet anything, just "no updates today".
This is the truth of course. Developers develop in spite of the current process management buzz word not because of it. With that said a daily 15 min standup seems to strike a reasonable balance for me/us personally between creating awareness within the team that might not have come up otherwise whilst not stealing too much time.
I feel what you said about the 'process' creeping in, however, if you don't mind, allow me to counter: My first N years had no version control, but that is not sufficient in my opinion to say it hasn't improved things.
Seriously, it was only "main" when I started at Apple 26 years ago. Our version control was such that when someone wanted to edit a file it was "checked out", locked to others on the team, until it was checked back in.
It worked surprisingly well (obviously no merge conflicts for one thing). I doubt anyone would suggest going back to something as simplistic (but I have to admit Git feels way too complicated than it should at times).
I too was coding 30 years or so ago. Back then we may not have had git, but we certainly had RCS and I recall switching to CVS.
There's a huge difference between a "daily progress meeting" and "sensible development". I too have seen a lot of process creeping into things and I'm glad I'm getting close to retirement.
"Daily stand-ups are for coordinating with the other devs. E.g. "It will take a couple extra days to do this backend API that you are waiting for", "I'm a bit stuck, anybody will have free time today to pair program?", "Who is able to drop their low priority task so that the high priority one gets done on time?"
"
Why do you need standups for this? They should talk to each other directly.
Because sometimes devs might not be listening/talking to others, and just need someone to organize an offline discussion to unblock them.
I have been to a team where X would need help on something that Y has solved in the past, Y does not care to listen in the standup and volunteer to help, and i had to ping him “Hey Y you have resolved this in the past, care to help X after the standup?”
Shitty standups go bidirectional ways. Managers can make them terrible, but devs can do that as well.
Daily stand-ups are for coordinating with the other devs. E.g. "It will take a couple extra days to do this backend API that you are waiting for", "I'm a bit stuck, anybody will have free time today to pair program?", "Who is able to drop their low priority task so that the high priority one gets done on time?"
If you're on track and don't neet anything, just "no updates today".