sage@afterdark~/
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// dispatch·2026-04-30·1 MIN READ·123 WORDS//signal

The 30-second rollback rule

If you can't undo it that fast, don't ship it. Make 'undo' a deploy gate, not a guideline.

reliabilityprinciples

A dispatch makes one move. Here's the move:

We don't ship anything that can't be rolled back in under 30 seconds. Not as a guideline — as a deploy gate. CI runs pnpm panic against the new deploy on every pull request and fails the build if the rollback can't restore the previous version inside the budget.

That single test changes the whole conversation about risk. We don't argue about whether a change is "scary." We measure whether the seatbelt works.

Two years in, we've used the rollback five times in production. Average time to restore: 14 seconds. The rule pays its rent.

If your stack can't roll back fast, your stack has a feature gap, not a culture gap. Fix the stack.

// filed under //signal · dispatch · 2026-04-30

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