Sharpen "How Does Caching Work?"

Work from the brief alone. Write what you would produce — actors, requirements, data, a first slice, your unknowns — before opening anything below it; the exercise stops working if you read the reality first.

The brief you were given

A teammate asks in the channel: "How does caching work? Should we add Redis to product search?" Rewrite the question three times — vague, researchable, decisive — and say what the decisive form makes answerable. Then say which rung an experiment answers better than a person.

Your attempt

Nothing here is checked. It exists so that the reveal below is a comparison rather than a reading.

The trap — the move that looks like progress and is not

Answering the original question — explaining caching — thoroughly. It is helpful, it is correct, and it leads the teammate to add Redis to a search whose slowness was a missing index, so the store now has an invalidation problem on top of the query it never fixed.

Read this even if you are confident. It is here rather than behind a button because it is the move most people actually make, it produces things that look like a project, and its cost arrives when the first hard requirement has nowhere to go.