RICK-ORPHEN state-vs-reality — reconcile the declaration with the behaviour
0. One line
Look at what the system does, not at what the value says. Then count every reader.
1. Why this exists — eight defects measured in a single day
Every one of them had the same shape: the source of truth was correct, and nobody was reconciling it. Not one was technically hard. They were all failing silently.
| # | Declaration | Reality | Damage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | three vocabularies coexisted in an industry field |
the signup form stored free text verbatim | 6 of 8 accounts had received no industry term at all |
| 2 | priceMonthlyJpy: null meant "price undecided" in one module and "declared free" in the checker |
every account used it free, ungated | matched neither declaration |
| 3 | middleware honoured expires_at |
the cron did not | expired grants kept working |
| 4 | reads were normalised by normalizeIndustry |
the write path (a settings dropdown) was not | 4 accounts lost their term on a single save |
| 5 | an integration reported status: active, reconnect_required: false |
failing every hour (86 times over 26 hours) | nothing surfaced; nobody noticed |
| 6 | "one alert per incident" should be enough | silence for a month (open, unacknowledged, 1,401 occurrences) | before that, 22 alerts an hour for the same incident. It swung between both extremes |
| 7 | the delivery ledger records everything | reopening reset the stage to 0 and collided with the old row, so the record was dropped | you could no longer tell whether a message was sent or suppressed |
| 8 | the sync job recorded "success" | it excluded broken integrations via a status = 'active' filter |
0 rows → success → incident auto-closed → monitoring green |
⚠ #4 happened after #1 was "fixed." Only the read path had been changed, and it was called done.
2. The procedure
Do not skip steps.
→ references/procedure.md
3. How to report
- If you write "fixed", count the actual damage. One of the expiry bugs above turned out, when counted in production, to have affected zero rows. The honest sentence was "closed the hole before it opened", not "closed a hole that was leaking"
- Never count an unchecked item as a pass. List them as "N unverified"
- Never carry a degradation through silently
4. Related
- Lessons: one value carrying two meanings / confirm the baseline is green before trusting a checker / verify the subject itself before reporting on it
- Neighbouring disciplines: boundaries between two machines (a path declared vs. where the file is) / overturning a "cannot be done" about an execution route by measuring it