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

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+# 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.