| name | reality-check |
| description | Use after `/gsd-ship` to verify product behaves correctly in production — runs Playwright e2e against deployed URL, checks Sentry for new errors, validates Posthog conversion funnel |
Reality Check (Post-Ship)
Iron law
NO SHIP IS COMPLETE WITHOUT RUNTIME VERIFICATION AGAINST PRODUCTION.
Code merged + CI green + deploy succeeded ≠ feature works for users. Reality check is the only thing that proves it.
When this skill activates
- Immediately after
/gsd-ship completes
- When user says: "did it work", "verify deploy", "check prod"
- 24 hours after ship for delayed regression check
- After ANY hotfix to production
The procedure
Step 1: Smoke test (within 1 minute of deploy)
Run Playwright e2e against deployed URL, NOT localhost:
PROD_URL=https://yourapp.com npm run test:e2e:prod
Expected: green. If red — rollback immediately, investigate next.
Step 2: Error rate (within 1 hour)
Check Sentry dashboard for last 1 hour vs last 24 hours baseline:
Last 1h errors: N
Last 24h average / hour: M
If N > 2*M → red flag, investigate
If N > 5*M → rollback now
Step 3: User behavior (within 6 hours)
Check Posthog (or similar) for conversion rate change on critical funnel:
Pre-ship baseline (avg of last 7 days): 12.3% signup→first-action
Post-ship 6h window: 11.8% (within ±1%) → OK
Post-ship 6h window: 8.1% → red flag
Post-ship 6h window: <5% → rollback
Step 4: 24-hour delayed regression
Some bugs surface after timezone rollover, weekly cron jobs, or batch processes. Check at 24h post-ship:
- Sentry error count for last 24h (full day cycle)
- Customer support tickets count
- Posthog funnel for full day
Tooling
- Playwright — pre-ship smoke + post-ship runtime smoke
- Sentry — error monitoring (set up SLO alerts: page on >5× baseline)
- Posthog — funnel monitoring (alert on >20% conversion drop)
- Plausible — alternative to Posthog (privacy-first, simpler)
If any of these are NOT installed — see skills/production-observability/SKILL.md first. Reality check requires observability infrastructure.
What to do when red
Step 1 (Playwright fail) → Rollback. Investigate logs. Hotfix or revert.
Step 2 (Sentry spike) → Triage top error. If user-facing: rollback. If internal: hotfix.
Step 3 (conversion drop) → Don't rollback yet. Check session replay. Often UX bug, not crash.
Step 4 (delayed) → Same triage as Step 2/3 but with more context.
Anti-patterns
- ❌ Trusting CI green to mean "shipped successfully" — CI tests staging, not production
- ❌ "We'll watch it" — no concrete time window = will be forgotten
- ❌ Reality check only on big releases — small releases cause big outages
- ❌ Skipping reality check because "it's a config change" — config changes cause biggest outages
- ❌ Running Playwright against staging instead of prod — staging ≠ prod
Toolkit hook
templates/global/hooks/pre-ship-reality-check.sh (PR 3) automates Steps 1-2 BEFORE allowing /gsd-ship to complete. If you have it installed: GSD will block ship if Sentry shows recent errors or Playwright fails.
Cross-references
skills/production-observability/SKILL.md — instrumentation discipline (prerequisite)components/production-observability.md — setup patterns per stacktemplates/global/hooks/pre-ship-reality-check.sh (PR 3) — automation
