Run the incident response baseline

Code the narrow path that serves incident commander coordinating mitigate → communicate → verify: accept → authorize/normalize → call dependency → validate → record. Keep stages named so a trace can show which boundary passed. Success must emit evidence useful to time_to_declare_m, time_to_mitigate_m, customer_update_sent, not only a 200 with prose. Predict the observable for POST /v1/rag/answer before running: INC-RAG-CIT-2201: feature flag off in 8m; customer update sent; groundedness restored.

Drive the path with recording fakes or local stubs. Assert call order and arguments. Idempotency keys or stable ids should keep retries from duplicating costly work where the product requires it. Product under test remains correctness incident for invalid RAG citations (SEV2) — resist adding unrelated features mid-path.

For Incident response lab, paste the CLI/HTTP transcript beside your prediction for POST /v1/rag/answer. If the oracle is unmet (INC-RAG-CIT-2201: feature flag off in 8m; customer update sent; groundedness restored), stop and debug this page; do not compensate with prompt folktales. Re-run once after a clean process start to catch hidden global state that would invalidate INC-RAG-CIT-2201.

Performance sketch: measure local p95 for the fake-backed path so later regressions are obvious. Keep concurrency modest until failure-handling proves limits. Log a single structured event per success with request id, revision, and the evidence field behind time_to_declare_m, time_to_mitigate_m, customer_update_sent. Avoid hidden global caches in the happy path unless the lab is about caching — and even then key by tenant. If the path calls a model, pin model id in config and echo it in the response for auditability. Remember incident commander coordinating mitigate → communicate → verify experiences wall-clock time, not your debugger’s single-step comfort.

Prefer explicit function names over a single god-object handleRequest. Thread a correlation id from ingress to the last log line. When streaming, define what partial failure means before coding. Snapshot one successful response body in fixtures after redaction. If the path writes to a queue, assert message attributes in the fake. Stop adding retries on this page; that is the next concern. In this chapter the product is correctness incident for invalid RAG citations (SEV2), the human stakeholder is incident commander coordinating mitigate → communicate → verify, and the incident id you design against is INC-RAG-CIT-2201. Re-state the oracle in your notes — INC-RAG-CIT-2201: feature flag off in 8m; customer update sent; groundedness restored — and keep the invariant visible: declare early; preserve evidence; mitigation scoped; no blame in channel. Track time_to_declare_m, time_to_mitigate_m, customer_update_sent as the scoreboard. Surface under change control: POST /v1/rag/answer. If you only have forty minutes, finish the fixture for team debugs for an hour without declaring — customers keep seeing wrong policy cites before polishing UI. Promotion language stays ternary: promote, hold, or roll back based on evidence, not hope.