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Roll back a bad change

You shipped a change. Something’s wrong — wrong bid, wrong keyword, wrong ad copy. You want it gone, fast, with a clear record of what happened.

The combination of git revert and bidsmith apply is the right answer. It’s three commands and two PRs (the broken one, the revert).

The five-minute fix

  1. Find the bad commit. Use git log or the GitHub Commits view. The commit message should make it obvious. Note the SHA.

    Terminal window
    git log --oneline -20

  2. Make a revert branch:

    Terminal window
    git checkout main
    git pull
    git checkout -b revert-summer-budget-mistake

  3. Revert the commit:

    Terminal window
    git revert <SHA>

    This produces a new commit that’s the inverse of the bad one. Git opens an editor for the commit message — keep the default (“Revert …”) or improve it (“Revert summer-budget bump — we meant €50/day, not €500/day”).

  4. Verify the diff:

    Terminal window
    bidsmith plan .

    Expected: ~ update rows showing the bad change being undone. Read carefully — confirm this is what you want.

  5. Push and PR:

    Terminal window
    git push -u origin revert-summer-budget-mistake

    Open the PR. In the description: what went wrong, and link the commit being reverted.

  6. Merge and apply as soon as someone approves:

    Terminal window
    git checkout main && git pull
    bidsmith apply .

Total time, if reviewers are around: 5–10 minutes.

Why a PR for a revert?

Two reasons:

  • The audit trail is the whole point. A revert PR with a description (“we meant €50/day, not €500/day”) is exactly the artifact you’ll want to refer to in three months when somebody asks “what happened that Tuesday?”
  • Reviewer confirmation catches the case where the bad commit also did something good. Sometimes a commit raises a budget and adds a useful negative keyword. The revert undoes both — a reviewer might catch that and propose a partial fix.

For genuine emergencies (the campaign is on fire, you have minutes, not hours), bypass the PR and apply the revert directly. The audit trail still exists in Git history; you just skipped the social step of review. Repair it after the fire is out by retroactively writing a postmortem PR or doc.

When a revert isn’t enough

git revert produces a clean inverse when the bad commit’s changes don’t conflict with anything after it. If they do — e.g. someone else has since edited the same campaign — Git flags the conflict and asks you to resolve it manually.

In that case:

  1. Resolve the conflict by hand (your editor + git add + git commit).
  2. Re-run bidsmith plan . and confirm the diff is what you want.
  3. Continue with the PR.

This is the same workflow as any other Git conflict. It’s also rare on bidsmith projects because .bid files tend not to have a lot of parallel edits per region.

Partial reverts

Sometimes the bad commit did three things and you only want to undo one. Don’t git revert the whole thing — just edit the file manually, commit, PR. The Git history will show “added the bad change” and “removed the bad change,” which is also a clean trail.

See also