> “…talk about delays on the critical path and adjust the schedule accordingly.”

And self-imposed deadlines are the worst—not saying that’s the case here. And when your leadership sets the goals, you do your best. But fast, good, cheap; pick two.

And if the deadlines really are hard, then you should be actively managing the critical path from the get-go. The very existence of upstream critical path dependencies that, as the parent poster’s story demonstrates, weren’t even necessary in the first place. Which suggests that this heroic agentic quick fix was the proverbial pound of cure.

I’d even go so far as to speculate that perhaps agentic coding also steered people away from the ounce of prevention in the first place. Humans aren’t perfect either, but over the past couple years I’ve had to spend increasingly much time asking, “Why again are we creating all this unnecessary complexity?”