pre-ship-gate

name	pre-ship-gate
description	A ship gate that runs before any production deploy: checks the silent failure modes that make a deploy 'succeed' while prod stays broken, then verifies the live revision instead of trusting deploy output.
category	quality
risk	safe
source	community
source_repo	Sharrmavishal/operating-kit
source_type	community
date_added	2026-07-07
author	Sharrmavishal
tags	["deployment","quality-gate","verification","ci-cd","production"]
tools	["claude","cursor","gemini"]
license	MIT
license_source	https://github.com/Sharrmavishal/operating-kit/blob/main/LICENSE

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 the flag that gates this change actually enabled in the target environment, not just in dev? Shipped code behind an off flag looks like a no-op deploy.
• Build cache / stale assets: Could a cached build or CDN layer serve the previous bundle after deploy? Confirm the artifact hash or asset fingerprint changed.
• Release pointer: Does the deploy update the symlink, active revision, or traffic pointer, or does it only upload the new build? Uploading is not releasing.
• Staged rollout / canary: If traffic is staged, is it stuck at 0 percent or waiting on a manual promote? A canary that never promotes is not a deploy.
• Env and secrets: Are the env vars and secrets the new code needs present in the target, not just locally? Missing config surfaces as runtime errors, not deploy errors.

Phase 2: Run the deploy

The human or the deploy tooling runs the actual command. This skill does not execute the production deploy itself. It gates it.

Phase 3: Verify live (before saying "shipped")

Confirm the running system, not the deploy log.

• Fetch the live version or revision identifier from the running service and compare it to the one you intended to ship.