Deploy Checklist — the fence between staging and prod

Run this checklist before any deploy. The production deploy itself is gated by a human approval step enforced in

protocols/permissions.md

Pre-deploy checks

• All tests passing locally and in CI.
• No unresolved TODOs or FIXMEs in the diff.
• Migrations are reversible, or an explicit rollback plan is documented.
• Env vars for new features are set in the target environment.
• Feature flags default to off for anything user-visible.
• Changelog or release notes updated.

Staging deploy

• Deploy. Watch logs for 5 minutes. Click through the new flow in a real browser.
• If anything looks off, roll back and investigate. Do not push through.

Production deploy

• This step requires human approval. The agent must ask, not assume.
• Deploy during a low-traffic window when possible.
• Watch error rate and latency dashboards for 15 minutes post-deploy.
• Be ready to rollback in one command; have the rollback command pre-typed.

Post-deploy

• Log the deploy (version, time, who approved) to episodic memory with

  importance: 8

  .
• If anything went wrong, run the debug-investigator loop and update this checklist with the new step that would have caught it.

Self-rewrite hook

After any rollback, this checklist is missing a step. Add it.