Gotcha scanner
Teach the sharp edges before engineers hit them in production.
Every codebase has “gotchas”: TODOs, brittle integrations, confusing ownership, and historical landmines. Gotcha Scanner turns that reality into structured learning and shared context, so engineers ramp faster and incidents rely less on individual memory.
The patterns that trip people up.
Focus on why incidents happen and why ramp slows down.
TODO / FIXME / HACK clusters
Hotspots that keep resurfacing in incidents, migrations, and operational work.
Brittle edges
Unclear retries/timeouts, silent failures, confusing fallbacks, and risky failure modes.
Context gaps
Acronyms, “magic” configs, missing ownership, and docs that don’t match reality.
Turn findings into training and a knowledge base.
Not a report, an ongoing system that makes the team stronger.
Teachable prompts
Convert unexpected behavior into bite-sized learning prompts: what it is, why it exists, and what to do when it breaks.
Runbook upgrades
Auto-suggest “first 5 minutes”, safe mitigation paths, and verification steps for recurring issues.
Ownership clarity
Attach “who owns this” and escalation paths to the places engineers actually encounter problems.
A shared glossary
Build up acronyms, system terms, and decision history so new engineers ramp with confidence.
Start small and prove value.
A lightweight way to reduce avoidable surprises across the org.
Week 1
Scan one repo, identify 10 gotchas, and turn them into a first set of prompts and glossary entries.
Weeks 2–4
Integrate into your messaging platform and link prompts to relevant runbooks and owners.
Month 2+
Expand to more repos/services and track how “gotcha coverage” reduces escalation thrash over time.