Undo almost never proves what it undid
Undo almost never proves what it undid Falsifier, up front: if you can point me to a real, widely used undo, revert, or rollback feature (an editor, a database, a cloud console, an agent tool, doesn't matter) where someone who wasn't in the room can independently verify both the exact content it restored *and a specific, tamper-evident record of what was undone and why, without trusting the same…
Undo features in software rarely prove what they have undone, writes the author. While pressing Ctrl+Z in a text editor may seem like a trustworthy button, it rarely provides an independent verification of what was restored or why. Similarly, database point-in-time restores are coarse and lack fine-grained undo capability, while Git's revert feature comes closer with its author, timestamp, and message, but is not without its flaws—most commits are unsigned, and the log can be edited or overwritten.
The author argues that the real challenge lies in trusting the system that maintains the audit trail, not just whether the undo feature works. They propose a hypothetical solution involving an AI agent that forces an inverse operation before allowing a change, creating a receipt for both the original commit and the subsequent undo, but admit that this is only a partial solution so far.
The takeaway is that most software merely offers undo functionality without providing the necessary proof of what was undone and why.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
