Title: Discussion 14 — Why Immutability Matters for Incident Debugging
Course: AIINFRA 301: Production RAG & LLMOps — Observability and Evaluation > Section: Week 14 — Prompt Management, Versioning, and Release Workflows

💬 Discussion 14 — Why Immutability Matters for Incident Debugging (20 pts)

Imagine you're on call and a user reports that your RAG app gave a confidently wrong answer with no citation, three weeks ago. You pull up the trace and it tells you exactly which prompt version handled that request. In your own words, answer: Why does prompt-version immutability — never editing a version, only ever creating new ones — matter for debugging a production incident that's traced back to a specific output? Consider what would happen to your ability to investigate that incident if prompt versions could be edited in place. Bring in at least one specific idea from this week's lecture (the registry-vs-loose-file table, the label mechanism, or the staging-gate workflow) to support your answer. Post your initial response (150+ words), then respond to at least two classmates — look for places where you agree, disagree, or can add a scenario from your own Lab 14 experience.