A support ticket came in last month with the subject line "the plan generator is broken." It was not, in fact, broken. The Celery task was running. The downstream service had accepted the job. The database row was sitting there with generation_status = 'in_progress' exactly as designed. From the server's point of view, the system was healthy. From the user's point of view, they had clicked a button fifteen minutes ago and nothing had happened since. I run Codens, a small AI dev harness, mostly solo. We have a product called Green Codens that turns Product Requirements Documents into actionable dev plans. The plan generation is a long-running AI job. It can take 30 seconds for a tiny repo or 30+ minutes for a sprawling one. We had built two completion paths: a webhook for the happy case and a polling fallback for when the webhook missed. The webhook had silently failed during a deploy. The polling fallback was scheduled to make its first call fifteen minutes after submission. We changed two numbers.…