Skill v1.0.1
currentAutomated scan100/100~2 modified
name: reversible-first description: Discipline. Stop the impact before finding the root cause, starting with actions that can be undone; anything irreversible waits for a person. Applied by the orchestrators in this package before proposing a mitigation, a rollback or a change in production. license: MIT metadata: version: "1.0.1" sre-layer: discipline
Reversible first
Mitigate first with what can be undone, leaving anything irreversible to a person.
When
Whenever users are affected and a choice of action exists, and whenever a skill is about to propose a change in production.
When not
When the mitigation itself would destroy what is needed later: evidence in a security incident, or data that a restore would overwrite. Then preserve first, and mitigate in a way that keeps it.
How
- Prefer the action that can be undone:
| Instead of | Prefer | |
|---|---|---|
| Deleting a job | Pausing it, and stopping its next scheduled run | |
| Blocking all traffic | Rate-limiting the one tenant or client causing it | |
| Deleting a compromised identity | Disabling it and revoking its sessions | |
| Rolling back a release that changed data | Turning off the feature flag |
- Check the second-order effect before acting. Ask what the action does to everything around it. Scaling an application up can make a saturated database worse, because each new instance opens more connections. Restarting pods can drop work in progress.
- Write how to undo it, before doing it. If the undo can't be written, the action isn't reversible.
- Hand irreversible actions to a person. Deleting, restoring, failing over, migrating data and changing access always end in a proposal: what, why, the risk, and how it would be undone if it could.
- Handing it to a person doesn't replace checking the target. The proposal names the environment, the resource and its current role (primary or replica, for example), from a recent check, with the scope and when to stop. A more visible prompt helps, but it doesn't prove the target is right.
- Ask for an independent review when the risk or the team's policy calls for one.
- If the person can't confirm the target, or can't go on safely, that step stops, and they ask for support or hand off.
- Confirm it worked. After a mitigation, check the user-facing signal recovered. If it didn't, undo it and reconsider the cause.
The mistake it prevents
Either users wait while the team searches for the root cause, or a fast fix causes a second incident.