Patch

A patch is the smallest change that makes the bug go away.

You did not rewrite the app. You changed the six lines that lied. That is the point. Small is faster to review, easier to rollback, and less likely to invent a second bug on the way out.

Think of it as replacing one tile, not pouring a new floor. The rest of the stack stays on stage.

Ship the mend, not the renovation

A commit that is only the fix is a gift. A pull request that is only the fix is a gift. Mixing a refactor, a rename, and a hotfix in one diff is how reviewers stop seeing the hole.

npm also uses "patch" for a version bump that only fixes. Same energy: smallest move that stops the bleeding. A "hotfix" is just a patch with the building on fire.

Forward or back

Shipping a patch still means you deploy. If the mend makes things worse, that is when you roll back to the last good build and try again. Patch forward when you have the fix. Roll back when you do not.

At a hackathon, the patch is often the whole afternoon: one crash, one test, one deploy. Do not let an agent "clean up while we're here." That is how a one-line fix becomes a 400-line surprise.

Ask for it out loud: "Fix only this failing case. No extra files." The CLI git diff should look boring.

What this unlocks

Most real software work is this, not architecture. Isolate the lie. Change those lines. Ship that diff. The demo survives because you did not rebuild the house during lunch.