I maintain about a dozen small products that share one homemade framework. Last week I built a conformance linter — a little tool that scans each repo for architectural drift — and I was one command away from wiring it into all of them at once.
I didn't. I ran it in two repos first.
That two-repo dry run is the cheapest safety I've added all year, and it caught two things that would otherwise have gone off in every repo at the same time. One of them was the linter being wrong about my own code.
Why fan-out is tempting, and why it bites
When you have a change that clearly belongs everywhere — a lint rule, a CI step, a dependency bump — the obvious move is to apply it everywhere. One sweep, done.
