Summary
This AI code generator rollout simulator shows how much of your 30-day error budget a bad AI-written change burns before it is reverted. Enter traffic, SLO, rollout ladder, soak time and detection speed. It compares a single 100% deploy, a staged rollout watched by a human, and an automated SLO gate, using plain arithmetic you can verify by hand.
Simulate how far an AI code change spreads before rollback
Paste in your traffic, SLO and ladder. The tool shows how much error budget a bad change from an AI code generator burns under a single deploy, a human watching a dashboard, and an automated gate.
Three lines of arithmetic, no hidden model
Error budget
Budget = (1 minus SLO) times average requests per second times 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days. At 200 req/s and 99.9%, that is 518,400 failed requests you are allowed per month.
Exposure over time
The ladder gives the share of traffic on the new code at each minute. The simulator integrates that share from the first request until your notice time plus your revert time, so a slow detection pushes the change into later, bigger stages.
Failed requests
Failed = requests per second times your failure share times the exposure integral. Dividing by the budget gives the percentage of the month one bad change costs. Three detection modes are compared on the same ladder.
From an AI-generated diff to a rollout plan
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1
Pick the pessimistic inputs
For a change written by an AI code generator and reviewed quickly, assume a high failure share if it is wrong, and a human notice time that matches your slowest recent incident, not your best one.
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2
Compare the three scenarios
The single deploy shows the worst case. The staged human case shows what your ladder buys you today. The automated gate shows what a gate on your SLO metric would change.
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3
Copy the plan into the runbook
The copy button exports the stages and the worst-case budget burn as plain text, ready to paste into a change ticket or a pull request description.
The first stage is where most of the budget is saved
A change that fails 20% of requests at 1% traffic produces failures on 0.2% of requests. The same change at 100% fails one request in five. The gap between those two numbers is the whole argument for a progressive rollout. When the code comes from a generator that can produce hundreds of lines in seconds, review time per line drops, and the first stage becomes the place where you find out.
- A 1% first stage limits the blast radius by 99% before anything else is measured.
- Soak time only helps if your signal can show a regression inside that window.
- Reverting faster is worth as much as noticing faster: both add to the exposure integral.
What to do with the three numbers
Single deploy
If this number is above 5% of the monthly budget for a plausible failure, a one-shot deploy is a decision to spend your budget on one change. Few teams make that choice on purpose.
Staged, human
This is your current reality if on-call watches graphs. If the peak exposure shows 100%, your ladder is cosmetic: the bad change reaches everyone before anyone reacts.
Staged, automated gate
This is the case for a gate that reads your SLO metric and reverts without asking. The value is only real if the gate trips on the same signal your SLO uses, so test it with a deliberately bad change.
Common questions
Is this AI code generator rollout simulator free?
Where do the numbers come from?
Why model AI-generated code differently from human-written code?
What does the simulator assume that real traffic does not do?
What is a good time to notice for an automated SLO gate?
Does a longer soak time always help?
Can I use this for feature flag rollouts and not only deploys?
Want the gate to do the reverting for you?
upstreamapi runs progressive rollouts with SLO gates and auto-rollback, so the third column is the one you ship with.