One thing that I've used in the past for safety that has been extremely helpful is to always log results to a detail level that allows reversal of whatever you

One thing that I've used in the past for safety that has been extremely helpful is to always log results to a detail level that allows reversal of whatever you did. For example, for a big DB update, create a CSV (or just write to STDOUT) all affected records along with their old data. If you get into this pattern enough, and your operations are similar enough, you can even standardize on the format so you can have a common tool that can undo an operation for you given the log. Certainly it's not something that can be applied for every use case, but when it can, it has so many benefits - an audit trail of what actually happened, ability to undo, and a common structure and approach for what dry runs should do (just output the log)