Originally published on Hashnode . Cross-posted for the DEV.to community. The first time I broke production with a migration, I was running a NOT NULL constraint on a 12-million-row users table during peak traffic. The query locked the table, the API timed out, payments failed, and I spent the next 90 minutes hunched over a Slack incident channel watching my MRR bleed in real time. The migration was technically correct. The execution context was completely wrong. Since then I've built a Claude Code workflow that catches dangerous migrations before they ship. Every migration in my codebase goes through an AI safety review that flags lock contention, missing rollback paths, and concurrent write hazards. I haven't shipped a migration-driven incident in 14 months. This is the workflow. What Makes Database Migrations Different A regular code change is reversible. If you ship a bug, you redeploy. The damage is bounded by how long it took you to notice. Migrations are not reversible.…