Hotfix Pattern — Context

Pattern: Hotfix
Component: context.md
Version: 1.1 | Updated: 2026-07-16

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Preconditions (must be true before activation)

• Severity (SEV1–SEV4) declared aloud in the incident channel
• Incident commander (IC) and scribe named
• Working communications channel + update cadence
• Last-known-good artifact digest or disable flag identified
• Impact hypothesis stated (what is broken for whom)
• Authorization for emergency deploy path granted by IC (and policy if required)

Trigger conditions (apply the pattern)

Apply when any of the following hold:

• Active customer-visible errors, incorrect money/data, auth failures, or safety issues
• Security exposure requiring immediate mitigation
• Error-budget burn that will breach SLO before a normal release can ship
• IC explicitly opens the hotfix lane

Do not apply when

• Issue is annoying but within normal release tolerance — use release-pattern
• Work is cleanup, refactor, or dependency bump without active harm
• You lack IC — declare roles first; do not freestyle prod
• Containment already restored service and only analysis remains — stop hotfixing; schedule durable fix

Required inputs

Input	Source	Minimum quality
Alert / report	Monitoring / support	Timestamp + symptom
Service map	Ops	Dependencies on the path
Recent changes	CD / flag history	Digests + deploy times
LKG digest / flag	Registry / flag service	Proven restore path
Runbook	Ops	Containment steps

Authority boundary

IC owns decisions. The hotfix agent proposes containment and minimal diffs. Nobody else deploys without IC ack. External customer communications follow the named communications authority — not the coding agent.