The Merge Queue Is Your New Critical Path: Release Management When Agents Outpace Main
Agentic coding tools made writing code nearly free, but every change still has to pass through one serialized gate to reach production. This is a practical guide to treating the merge queue as the real critical path, sizing it, and keeping green main from becoming your delivery ceiling.
Your engineering org bought a dozen coding agents this year and got faster at exactly one thing: producing pull requests. Everything downstream of the keyboard, review, integration, and the merge itself, is now the part that decides how fast you actually ship. The critical path moved. Most delivery leaders are still managing the old one.
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