Pre-merge CI review for the permitting service must finish before merge gates. Why avoid Message Batches there?

Pre-merge CI review for a municipal permitting service is a blocking workflow: the merge gate cannot close until review finishes inside the pipeline's latency budget. The synchronous API fits that need; Message Batches lack the latency SLAs CI gates require because batches may take many hours within their processing window. Using batches for pre-merge review would stall merges or force unsafe merges without completed checks. Assuming batches always finish faster than any synchronous call confuses cost/throughput optimization with latency guarantees. Claiming CI gates never care about review latency or merge timing ignores why gates exist—to keep defective fee or zoning logic out of production on a predictable cadence. Believing batches provide hard sub-second SLAs ideal for pre-merge checks attributes interactive characteristics to a deferred API. Exam caveat: choose Message Batches for deferred municipal corpora; choose synchronous calls for human- or merge-blocking steps. Operational check: measure p95 CI review latency against the merge SLA, confirm the path uses synchronous inference, and document that batch jobs are reserved for non-blocking overnight extract or offline audit workloads.