pre-ship-gate

Pre-Ship Gate

Overview

Most bad deploys do not fail loudly. The pipeline goes green, the CLI prints "deployed", and the old or broken version is still what users hit. This skill is the gate you run right before a production deploy and right after, so an agent stops trusting deploy output and starts confirming what is actually live. It exists because "the deploy command exited 0" and "the new version is serving traffic" are two different facts, and agents routinely confuse them.

When to Use This Skill

• Use before running any command that pushes to a production or staging environment.
• Use when an agent is about to report "shipped", "deployed", or "live".
• Use when a deploy reported success but users still see the old behavior.
• Use when a release involves database migrations, feature flags, or a staged rollout.

How It Works

The gate has three phases. Do not skip to phase 3.

Phase 1: Pre-flight (before the deploy runs)

Walk the silent failure catalog. These are the modes that let a deploy "succeed" while production stays broken. For each one, confirm it or flag it. Do not assume.

• Migrations: Are schema migrations part of this release, and will they run against the target before the new code serves traffic? A deploy that ships code expecting a column that does not exist yet fails silently for users, not for the pipeline.
• Feature flags: Is t