Building a Blast Radius Skill - Where Dev, QA and ClaudeAI Collide

You've merged a PR and something breaks in production. The change looked small, but it touched a config that cascaded through three services you didn't even know depended on it. Blast radius analysis prevents that. It uses Claude to trace every dependency, config, and execution path your code change touches, and tells you what could break before it ever leaves your branch.

Along the way, it catches things you'd normally miss:

Dead code
Missing overrides
Broken configs

All surfaced before a QA engineer even looks at it.
But it goes further. The same analysis gives QA hard evidence to push back when the scope of a change hasn't been fully addressed, with data, not opinion. That means fewer rounds of back-and-forth and faster, cleaner releases.

We'll build this as a reusable "skill" in Claude Code, showing how agentic harnesses support composable, repeatable workflow building blocks that go far beyond traditional test automation. Whether you're a developer tired of unexpected breakage, a QA engineer looking for better tooling, or a lead trying to reduce cycle time, this talk reframes what's possible when you think about the whole problem, not just the obvious solution.

While this is defined as "Intermediate" level, it will be useful and challenging for all levels of experience and role.