Dry-run first

A find-and-replace across a live site is a small, sharp tool. The failure mode is not subtle: you replace the wrong exact string and something quietly breaks in two hundred posts. The fix was not more confirmation dialogs. It was showing the consequences before causing them.

What a dry run has to show

A count is not enough. "312 matches" tells you nothing about whether you are about to do something foolish. A useful preview lists which posts, how many matches in each, and enough surrounding text for a human to recognise the mistake before it happens.

1 / 1

Numbered compartments in a weathered wooden wall, folded paper tucked into one slot

Guardrails that stop and ask

Some patterns can disturb layout — a fragment that appears inside markup, a marker that only exists in one editor's output. Detecting those and stopping, rather than proceeding with a warning, felt fussy while building it. It has since prevented two genuine messes, which is the entire return on the effort.

• Preview before every bulk operation, with real counts and real context.
• Refuse ambiguous patterns instead of guessing at intent.
• Make the safe path the default one, not the one you have to remember to take.
• Keep a record of what was changed, so it can be reasoned about later.

The habit generalised past plugins. Anywhere I now write something that changes many things at once, the preview comes first and the write happens behind it.