outthislife Runtime Debug
When something breaks at runtime (a URL 500s, a deploy is down, an ephemeral env misbehaves), look at what actually happened before editing code.
Steps
- Reproduce and capture the real failure (status, error, request id, time).
- Check observability first: logs, traces, metrics. Use an observability MCP (e.g. Datadog) if one is available/connected; otherwise fall back to the platform's log stream (CI job, container, Jenkins, cloud logs).
- Locate the failing service/line from the evidence, not a guess.
- Fix the real cause. Don't add logging-only "fixes" and call it done.
- For intentional lab/ephemeral config (test secrets, fail-open), don't raise false alarms — leave required env in place.
Don't
- Rewrite code speculatively before reading logs.
- Report fixed without re-checking the runtime.