Ask HN: Do you bother making state changes reversible?

1 points by Pepp38 ↗ HN
I’m trying to understand how people handle changes to real system state. In many projects, once something writes to a DB or config, the previous state is effectively gone unless you planned for it upfront.

I haven’t personally dealt with large-scale failures here, but with more automation and AI writing state directly, it feels like reversibility matters more. Curious whether teams actively design for rollback, or mostly rely on backups and manual fixes.

2 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 21.7 ms ] thread
Check out Nix and NixOS. NixOS is designed to keep a record on system changes, and rollbacks are easy (atleast regarding configuration changes).