"Why your long-running AI agent feels broken (even when it isn't)"

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 s