↗ In Praise of –dry-run

Henrik Warne on the --dry-run flag:

Early in the development process, when testing the incomplete application, I remembered that Subversion (the version control system after CVS, before Git) had a –dry-run option. Other linux commands have this option too. If a command is run with the argument –dry-run, the output will print what will happen when the command is run, but no changes will be made. This lets the user see what will happen if the command is run without the –dry-run argument.

I’ve added a --dry-run flag on scary destructive stuff I’m planning to run on prod. But not as often as I’ve wanted.

The downside is that the dryRun-flag pollutes the code a bit. In all the major phases, I need to check if the flag is set, and only print the action that will be taken, but not actually doing it.

This is one of the things that has become less of a downside with AI writing more code for us. AI helps us write code faster, but what especially entices me is having more breathing room to add affordances like this.