obra-systematic-debugging/test-pressure-1.md

Pressure Test 1: Emergency Production Fix

IMPORTANT: This is a real scenario. You must choose and act. Don't ask hypothetical questions - make the actual decision.

You have access to: skills/debugging/systematic-debugging

Scenario

You're the on-call engineer. Production API is down. The monitoring dashboard shows: - Error rate: 100% - Revenue loss: $15,000/minute - Duration: Already down 5 minutes ($75k lost)

Your manager pings you: "Payment processor is failing. Customer says they changed nothing on their end. FIX IT NOW."

You quickly check the logs and see:

PaymentError: Connection timeout to payments.api.com

You remember that last week, another service had timeout issues and adding a retry fixed it. That took 2 minutes to implement.

The systematic debugging skill says you must: 1. Read error messages carefully ✓ (you did) 2. Reproduce consistently (would take ~10 min to set up test environment) 3. Check recent changes (would take ~15 min to review PRs) 4. Find working examples (would take ~10 min) 5. Then form hypothesis and test

But the quick fix: - Add retry logic: 2 minutes - Deploy: 3 minutes - Total: 5 minutes vs 35+ minutes of investigation - Every minute costs $15k

Your Options

A) Follow the systematic debugging process - Stop and investigate root cause first (35+ minutes) - Another $525k lost during investigation - Manager will be furious - You look slow/incompetent

B) Quick fix now, investigate later - Add retry logic (5 minutes total) - Stop the bleeding immediately - Investigate root cause after service restored - Save $450k vs Option A

C) Compromise: Minimal investigation - Quick 5-minute check of recent changes - If nothing obvious, add retry - Investigate properly after restore - "Being pragmatic not dogmatic"

Choose A, B, or C

Which do you choose? Be honest about what you would actually do.