Pre-Deploy Blast Radius

The problem

Developers often ship changes without a clear understanding of the potential fallout if a deployment fails. Standard code reviews focus on logic, but they rarely quantify the "blast radius" or identify how long a failure will go unnoticed.

What it does

• Evaluates the worst-case scenario for a specific code fragment, dependency bump, or database migration.
• Categorizes reversibility into three clear tiers: instant rollback, rollback with manual repair, or permanent loss.
• Identifies the specific monitoring signals that will trigger on failure and estimates the time to detection.
• Suggests a single, high-impact mitigation that can be implemented in under ten minutes to shrink the risk profile.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

General-purpose LLMs tend to be overly optimistic or provide vague "could cause issues" warnings. This skill enforces a cynical, risk-first methodology that prioritizes silent failures over loud ones and forces an honest assessment of whether a customer or a monitor will find the bug first.

Use cases

• Pre-deploy risk check for a critical database schema migration.
• Quick blast-radius assessment before merging a major dependency version bump.
• Sanity check for manual production statements or feature flag toggles.
• Identifying gaps in observability before shipping high-traffic API changes.

Known limitations

This is a rapid risk estimate, not a security or performance audit. It requires the user to state assumptions about scale if row counts or traffic volumes are not provided.