Example

Think of a fintech company with an internal policy written in the developer handbook or repo README:

No production changes over the weekend unless explicitly reviewed and marked urgent.

But GitHub had no built-in way to enforce this rule, or even monitor the context around it.

Mistakes happen

A pull request (code change) was reviewed and merged Friday evening. The engineer received approval, and the PR triggered a workflow that required a deployment review. The deployment reviewer approved it late Friday night, assuming the deployment would happen on Monday. But the change went live immediately after approval, triggering a Friday night deployment — with no on-call team available.

The deployment failed silently, and no alerts were raised because:

  • Workflow logs weren’t monitored after the merge
  • No tracking system could associate the pull request → deployment → failure chain
  • GitHub had no policy-level enforcement after the merge

The $10K mistake

  • A broken backend service throughout Saturday
  • Over 6 hours of customer-facing issues
  • A few thousand dollars lost in on-call developers' time for post mortem fixes and customer trust

  • A CTO asking:

    “Why didn’t we catch this before it went live?”

  • And a Monday emergency meeting trying to figure out:

    “Who merged this?”
    “Why did it go live on a weekend?”
    “Didn’t we have a policy against this?”

Hard truth

GitHub’s protection rules end at the merge button.

They don’t:

  • Monitor what happens after a merge
  • Enforce time-sensitive rules like “no Friday deploys”
  • Link PR reviews to downstream incidents or failures

But Warestack does!