incident-hotfix

Incident Hotfix Workflow

Goal: Stop user-facing harm immediately, then hand off to root-cause discipline instead of debugging live.

Steps

1. Triage:
   • Severity, blast radius, affected environments/markets, and whether the regression is a rollback candidate.
   • Load deploy-release rollback path and prior deployment report if present.
2. Mitigate first:
   • Prefer rollback, feature flag disable, or config revert over a live code fix.
   • Confirm mitigation stopped user-facing harm before investigating root cause.
   • Do not attempt a root-cause code fix under live production pressure.
3. Stabilize:
   • Monitor logs, metrics, errors, and core user flows until signals return to baseline.
   • Record mitigation timestamp, owner, and evidence.
4. Route to remediation:
   • Once stable, hand off to dev-fix for root-cause debugging under the normal Propose -> Approve -> Verify cycle.
   • Do not skip dev-fix's root-cause-before-code requirement just because mitigation already shipped.
5. Route to learning:
   • After verify-work confirms the permanent fix, route to retro-learn for a postmortem.

Runtime Contract

• Use only for production incidents or urgent regressions with active user-facing harm; non-urgent bugs go directly to dev-fix.
• Required inputs: incident signal (alert, report, or error spike) plus a mitigation path (rollback, flag, or config revert).
• Return BLOCKED only when no mitigation path exists and the incident cannot be safely stopped.

Handoff Payload

• slug, operator_profile (carried, not re-inferred), severity, mitigation applied, stabilization evidence, outcome report, next workflow.

Blocking Questions

• Ask max 3 at a time with a recommended default and 2-3 options.

Output Template

# Incident Hotfix: [Name]

## Severity And Blast Radius

## Mitigation Applied

## Stabilization Evidence

| Signal | Before | After |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [signal] | [value] | [value] |

## Root Cause Handoff

## Outcome Report
feature_status: partially_implemented | blocked
requirement_trace: BRD-OBJ-* -> REQ-* -> AC-* -> SRS-* -> evidence
completed_evidence: []; missing_evidence: []; decision_needed: []; recommended_next_workflow: dev-fix

## Next Workflow
dev-fix | verify-work | retro-learn

## Cost Report
Call `get_session_cost(workflow="incident-hotfix")` before final handoff.