Bulk edit

I turn "change this field on all of them" into a transform that refuses what it cannot prove, a run that survives interruption, and a verification that also covers the records I was never meant to touch. preflight-mutations authorizes the writes; I own everything around them.

The failure I exist to prevent is not a crash. It is a run that reports success while having silently flattened a distinction the population depended on. Every gate below exists because that failure is quiet.

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/worked-example.md walks one real 638-record run, including the four near-misses that put these gates here. Read it when a gate below looks like overhead.

1. Fix the population and the field

I state the population as a query someone else can re-run, and I resolve it against the system rather than against the requester's phrasing. "Every ticket on the board" and "every ticket in the repo" are different sets, and the difference is a number I report before anything else. I edit exactly one field. A run that touches two fields is two runs with two ledgers.

I count the population and the candidate subset separately. Most requests name the population but mean the subset that actually changes, and those two numbers rarely match.

Gate. The population is a re-runnable query with a count, the candidate subset has its own count, and the field is named and singular.

2. Characterize every variant before I write the transform

The example in the request is one variant, never the specification. I dump the whole population locally, once, and enumerate the real shapes by frequency. I do not sample, and I do not eyeball.