Pattern: AI as Coordination Tax Eliminator — Eight PRs in One Incident, Human Judgment Preserved

paddo.dev·medium signal

paddo.dev documents a production incident where an engineer merged eight pull requests by delegating the 'coordination tax' — context-switching between debugging, testing, deployment, and database work — to an AI agent while retaining all judgment calls about deployment timing and risk. The key insight: a greenfield replacement system already contained latent versions of the exact bugs just fixed, because it hadn't accumulated production's hard-won scars. AI handles mechanical execution; operational wisdom remains human.