🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The one script eating the whole API
The situation
A weather API serves thousands of apps, and normally everyone gets snappy replies. Then one developer's runaway script starts firing thousands of requests per second from a single account — far more than any normal app. The server is now so busy answering that one script that everybody else's requests slow to a crawl. Total traffic isn't really that high; it's just wildly lopsided toward one caller.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
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Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL problem here?