The Tax on the Happy Path · What I learned by removing the elaborate CI gate I'd built to slow my AI agents down — after realizing it had never actually caught anything.

I was halfway through another PR, regenerating the proof file for the fourth time after rebasing on main, when I realized I couldn’t name a single PR the permit gate had caught. Not “caught that other CI didn’t also catch.” Just caught . I decided to look up the numbers, and then I removed the gate entirely. What the Gate Was The short version: every PR to Zabriskie had to be accompanied by a…