Broke in Production
The Day I Couldn’t Answer the Simplest Production Question There’s a question every developer asks instinctively when something breaks: “Is this also broken in production?” It’s not a sophisticated question. It doesn’t require deep observability, distributed tracing, or a fancy dashboard. It’s the most basic sanity check in software development. And yet, in some environments, answering it is surprisingly hard. The Setup You’re working in a dev environment. You make a change—or maybe you just stumble into a bug—and something clearly isn’t working. Your next step should be obvious: “Let me check production and see if this already exists.” In a healthy engineering environment, this is trivial: You log into production (or a read-only version of it), or You hit the same endpoint in prod, or You use a staging environment that mirrors production and runs the exact same version Within minutes, you know: ✅ “Yes, this is already broken in prod” ✅ “No, this is something I just introduced” T...