Monday Morning

The agent finished in four minutes.

The developer leaned back and read through the output. It was clean. Cleaner than clean, actually, the kind of code that makes you wonder, briefly, why you spent the last decade learning to write it yourself. Proper error handling. Sensible variable names. The retry logic followed the pattern used everywhere else in the payment service, which meant it would pass review without a comment.

The ticket had been sitting in the backlog for three weeks. A straightforward extension to the payment retry flow: handle a new failure code from the upstream processor, add it to the retry sequence, and make sure the response gets logged correctly. Two hours of work, maybe three if the tests needed coaxing. The agent had done it in the time it took to get coffee.

The developer read through it again. Not because anything looked wrong. Because something that fast, that tidy, deserves a second look. Read everything. Trust nothing unread.

Nothing wrong. The logic was sound. The new failure code was handled. The retry sequence was extended correctly. The tests covered the new path and passed locally.

The PR went up at 9:47 AM.

By 10:15 AM, the PR had two approvals. One reviewer left a single comment: "nice." In this codebase, that meant something. The developer merged it before the design review.

It was a normal morning. Productive, even.

The merge happened before lunch.

Staging broke at 2:11 PM.