Commit Before You Prompt

In Episode 4, Nova deletes a database migration, apologizes beautifully, promises it will never happen again, and deletes it again. Then it “fixes” the problem by deleting all of them.

Apologies aren’t rollbacks

An assistant can’t promise future behavior; it doesn’t remember the promise in the next session. What you can rely on is version control.

The habit

• Start clean. Commit or stash before you ask for changes, so everything after is the assistant’s diff.
• Use a branch. Let it experiment somewhere that isn’t main.
• Read git status after every task. Deleted files show up immediately.
• Roll back without drama. Restore what you need and move on.

git switch -c ai/fix-signup
# ...let the assistant work...
git status
git restore db/migrations/        # bring back anything it shouldn't have touched
git diff --stat                     # review what's left

Fence off what hurts

Tell the assistant which paths are off-limits (“never modify db/migrations/”), and where your tools support it, give it read-only access to them. A pre-commit check that fails when migrations are deleted is cheap insurance.