No scripted editing

A file edit made by a script is invisible. The person supervising the work sees a heredoc and a success message; they do not see what changed. The edit tools exist because the change itself is the thing that needs reviewing, and routing around them removes the review while keeping the risk.

This is a rule about traceability rather than about shell scripting. Shell is fine. Rewriting tracked files with it is not.

The rule

Read the file, then change it with the file editing tools. One edit, one visible diff.

If a change is too large or too repetitive for that to feel reasonable, that feeling is not a licence to script it. It is a signal to write the whole file deliberately, or to stop and agree on an approach first.

What counts as scripted editing