A few weeks ago, one of our developers pushed a refactor touching one of the agents Latitude runs in production. It looked harmless in review. Every request kept going through and latency stayed flat, but the prompt cache hit rate (how often an AI successfully reuses its cache instead of rereading information), which is normally above 80 percent, fell to 30. For perspective, cache reads cost about a tenth of what fresh input tokens do, so the drop tripled our effective token spend on the same traffic.
Thankfully, a monitor in Latitude was watching that rate and the drop opened an incident which, in turn, dispatched Claude Code in the cloud, and a few minutes later a pull request appeared that restored the cache structure the refactor had broken. A developer reviewed the change, merged it, and the hit rate recovered within the hour.