Deploys Are SSH + git pull at 5pm Friday. Why Change It?
The team ships by SSHing into prod and running git pull, often at 5pm Friday. A teammate says it has always worked. Defend what a real deploy needs without cargo-culting.
the decision you defend
Your team deploys by SSHing into the prod server and running git pull, and the current release is planned for 5pm on Friday. A teammate says this has worked for two years, so why change anything? What do you argue, and why?
the situation
Your team runs a monolith on two VMs behind a load balancer. The release process is: SSH into each box, run git pull, sometimes run npm install if someone remembers dependencies changed, and systemctl restart the service. The next release is scheduled for 5pm this Friday because "that is when the sprint ends."
context
There is a CI server that runs tests on pull requests, but nothing after merge; the prod boxes just pull main. Last month a deploy half-worked because one VM had a local hotfix edit that conflicted with the pull, and nobody noticed for a day. When you raise the process in retro, a teammate says: we have deployed this way for two years and it has always worked, why add ceremony?
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 4 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.