Every development team has heard this sentence:
“Let’s just push one more quick fix.”
It sounds harmless. Responsible, even. Something small broke, a customer is affected, production is slightly off — and the fix is obvious. Five minutes of work. No need to go through the full process. No need to wait for code review. No need to bother QA. Just one tiny change to keep things moving.
The problem is not the quick fix itself.
The problem is the culture that grows around it.
Over time, “just one more quick fix” becomes the default way changes enter production. And once that happens, your delivery pipeline slowly collapses — not because anyone is incompetent, but because the system you built to protect quality gets bypassed piece by piece.
Previous article in this category: https://codecraftdiary.com/2026/01/31/why-almost-done-work-breaks-development-flow/
How Quick Fixes Become the Normal Path to Production
Most teams don’t start with bad intentions. The first few quick fixes usually happen under real pressure:
- A critical bug blocks a customer.
- A payment fails.
- An integration with a third-party API breaks overnight.
- A configuration mistake takes down part of production.
At this stage, bypassing the process feels justified. You skip review because “it’s just a one-line change.” You deploy manually because the CI pipeline takes too long. You test in production because the bug only reproduces there.
Nothing explodes. The fix works. The customer is happy. The team moves on.
That success teaches the wrong lesson.
The next time something small breaks, the team remembers:
“We fixed it quickly last time. Let’s do it the same way.”
After a few months, you end up with two delivery paths:
- The official pipeline: PR → review → tests → CI → deploy
- The real pipeline: Slack message → quick commit → direct deploy
The second one becomes the faster, socially accepted option. The first one starts to feel like bureaucracy.
The Hidden Damage: You Don’t See the Cost Immediately
The real damage of quick fixes is not in the individual changes. It’s in what they do to your system over time.
1. Your CI Pipeline Stops Being Trustworthy
Once people regularly bypass CI, the pipeline stops reflecting reality. Builds fail for reasons nobody prioritizes fixing. Tests become flaky and get ignored. Warnings pile up.
Eventually, developers stop trusting the pipeline at all.
At that point, CI is no longer a quality gate — it’s just a ritual.
Teams running on platforms like GitHub or GitLab often reach this state not because the tools are bad, but because the workflow culture quietly degrades around them.
2. Code Reviews Become Optional (Which Means Useless)
When urgent fixes bypass review, reviews lose their authority. Review becomes something you do for “normal work,” while “important work” skips it.
That’s a subtle but dangerous shift.
You’re effectively teaching the team that quality checks are less important when stakes are higher. Over time, this creates blind spots exactly where you need discipline the most: production-critical paths.
3. You Normalize Risk Without Noticing
Every quick fix that works without immediate consequences normalizes risk-taking:
- Deploying without review becomes acceptable.
- Deploying without tests becomes acceptable.
- Deploying without understanding side effects becomes acceptable.
The absence of incidents is interpreted as proof that the process is unnecessary — until the day it fails in a way that costs real money, data, or trust.
By the time that incident happens, the delivery pipeline is already too eroded to protect you.
The Psychological Trap: Quick Fixes Feel Like Ownership
Quick fixes often feel good on a personal level.
You fixed a production issue fast.
You unblocked a customer.
You were the hero who saved the day.
This creates a subtle incentive problem: the system rewards individuals for bypassing the process. The delivery pipeline, which exists to protect the team and the product, becomes an obstacle to individual heroics.
Over time, teams drift into a culture where:
- Being fast matters more than being safe.
- Fixing symptoms is rewarded more than fixing root causes.
- Short-term relief beats long-term stability.
This is how delivery pipelines rot — not from neglect, but from well-meaning people optimizing for speed under pressure.
Real-World Pattern: The “Temporary” Hotfix That Becomes Permanent
A common pattern looks like this:
- A bug appears in production.
- Someone applies a quick fix directly in production or through a rushed commit.
- The fix is labeled “temporary.”
- The team plans to clean it up later.
- Later never comes.
Weeks later, another change interacts with that temporary fix and breaks something else. Now nobody fully understands the code path. The pipeline didn’t catch it because the fix never went through proper tests.
The original quick fix saved 30 minutes.
The long-term cost is measured in hours of debugging, fragile code, and lost confidence in the system.
Why This Destroys Flow (Not Just Quality)
Quick fixes don’t just hurt quality. They destroy delivery flow.
Once bypassing the pipeline becomes normal:
- Developers hesitate to touch fragile areas.
- Releases become unpredictable.
- Small changes cause big side effects.
- People slow down because they don’t trust the system.
Ironically, the behavior that started as “moving faster” ends up making delivery slower and more stressful.
You trade short-term speed for long-term friction.
How to Fix the Culture Without Becoming Bureaucratic
This isn’t about banning hotfixes. Production incidents are real. Speed matters. The goal is to make fast changes also safe changes.
1. Make the Fast Path the Safe Path
If your CI takes 40 minutes, people will bypass it.
If your review process blocks urgent fixes, people will bypass it.
Your pipeline must be optimized for speed in emergencies:
- Lightweight reviews for hotfixes.
- Fast CI path for critical changes.
- Clear “hotfix” workflow that still enforces minimal quality gates.
2. Track Bypasses as Technical Debt
Every bypass should leave a visible trace:
- A ticket to add tests later.
- A follow-up task to clean up the quick fix.
- A post-incident note explaining what was skipped.
If bypassing the pipeline leaves no trace, it becomes invisible debt.
3. Reward Stability, Not Heroics
Publicly recognize:
- Fixes that go through the proper pipeline under pressure.
- Improvements to CI speed.
- Reductions in flaky tests.
Stop glorifying the person who “just pushed a fix to prod” without safeguards. You want to reward people who improve the system, not just fight its symptoms.
The Core Insight
“Just one more quick fix” is never just one.
It’s a small exception that rewires how your team relates to the delivery pipeline.
It teaches people what the real process is — not the one in documentation, but the one that gets things shipped.
If your real process bypasses quality gates under pressure, then under real pressure, you don’t have a delivery pipeline at all.
You have hope and heroics.
And that’s not a strategy.