Sort every action by whether you can undo it

Before I let an AI take any real action, I ask one question, and it is not "is this safe." It is "can I undo this." That single sort is the most useful line I draw through any workflow, and almost nobody draws it on purpose.

Here is the whole idea. Every action falls into one of two buckets. Reversible: you can put it back the way it was. A code change on a branch, a draft saved, a file you can restore from git. Irreversible: once it happens, it happens. Money moves, an email sends, a row gets hard-deleted, a deploy hits production. The bucket an action lands in should decide how much ceremony it gets, and most people never sort at all. They apply one flat level of caution to everything, which means they are too slow on the safe stuff and not careful enough on the stuff that bites.

Why does this one distinction carry so much weight?

Because it lets you be fast and safe at the same time, instead of trading one for the other. If I know a step is reversible, I let the model rip, because the worst case is I roll it back and lose a few minutes. If I know a step is irreversible, I slow down, add a human, add a gate. The sort turns a vague feeling of risk into a concrete decision you can automate.

Think of it like trading. A limit order resting on the book is reversible, you can cancel it all day and nothing has happened yet. A market sell is irreversible the instant it fills. You do not babysit the limit order. You absolutely babysit the market fill, because there is no cancel button once the trade clears. Same discipline, applied to your build.

The failure mode has a shape you will start to see everywhere. People agonize over reversible decisions, renaming a variable like it is a career move, then click the irreversible button, the send, the delete, the deploy, on autopilot because they are tired. The care is spent in exactly the wrong place. Sorting first fixes the misallocation before it costs you.

The takeaway: Reversible or irreversible is the first question, not "is it safe," because that one sort tells you where to spend your caution and where to move fast.