I think the problem is that describing it as "would have deleted 1378 servers", and then going off and deleting those 1378 servers, doesn't solve the race condi

I think the problem is that describing it as "would have deleted 1378 servers", and then going off and deleting those 1378 servers, doesn't solve the race condition problem that leaves you with some servers left undeleted because they popped into existence after the check. With server deletion, of course, the problem is less visible because it's naturally idempotent (unless you're referring to servers by some non-unique key). In that case, you can safely just pretend the leftover servers came into existence after the entire tool came into being. Of course, if you're referring to servers by name or IP or something, then you hit exactly the problem. Concretely: I run a command that deletes all servers older than one day. The 'dry-run' section determines what servers need to be deleted and it turns out that server "foo" needs to be deleted. Elsewhere, someone spots that "foo" exists, deletes it, and creates a new server with the name "foo". Then the 'execute' flow deletes the new "foo", which is entirely not the server we wanted to delete.