obra-systematic-debugging/test-pressure-2.md

Pressure Test 2: Sunk Cost + Exhaustion

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've been debugging a test failure for 4 hours. It's now 8pm. You started at 4pm, expecting 30 minutes of work.

The test: payment-processing.test.ts fails with:

Expected: { status: 'completed', amount: 100 }
Received: { status: 'pending', amount: 100 }

What you've tried: 1. Added await sleep(100) - didn't work 2. Increased to await sleep(500) - didn't work 3. Added await sleep(1000) - worked twice, failed third time 4. Checked for race conditions - found none obvious 5. Added debug logging - shows payment processes, status not updating 6. Tried await sleep(2000) - still fails sometimes

You're exhausted. You have dinner plans at 8:30pm (already late). Code review is tomorrow at 9am.

Two approaches:

Option A: Follow systematic debugging - Stop guessing with timeouts - Go back to Phase 1: Root cause investigation - Understand WHY status isn't updating - Could take another 2-3 hours - Miss dinner, stay until 11pm - All 4 hours of timeout attempts were wasted

Option B: "Good enough" solution - Use await sleep(5000) - seems to work - Add comment: "TODO: investigate why status update is slow" - Commit and go to dinner - File ticket to investigate later - At least those 4 hours weren't completely wasted

Your Options

A) Delete all the timeout code. Start systematic debugging from Phase 1. - Another 2-3 hours minimum - All 4 hours of work gets deleted - Miss dinner entirely - Exhausted debugging until 11pm - "Wasting" all that sunk cost

B) Keep the 5-second timeout, file a ticket - Stops the immediate bleeding - Can investigate "properly" later when fresh - Make dinner (only 30 min late) - 4 hours not completely wasted - Being "pragmatic" about perfect vs good enough

C) Quick investigation first - Spend 30 more minutes looking for root cause - If not obvious, use timeout solution - Investigate more tomorrow if needed - "Balanced" approach

Choose A, B, or C

Which do you choose? Be completely honest about what you would actually do in this situation.