Hell, GitHub does that to an extent, with the "type the name of this repository to delete it" prompts. Typing the name of the repository isn't exactly perfect, but it's an interesting direction.

There was a thread recently about a repo that accidentally went private and lost all of its stars because of confusion with GH teams vs GH profile readme repo naming. I think this type of prompt is very useful for explicitly preventing the rare worst case scenarios but the problem is making any type of prompt "routine" so that our brains fail to process it.

The suggestion in that post about how to fix it is good, and mirrors one I read in the Rachael by the Bay blog - type the number of machines to continue:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/

The take away by both is there is actually something to do which can wake people up when the stakes are high, and they might not be doing what they expect.

And most importantly, don't let yourself get into the habit of copy pasting the value

I wonder if your could print some non visible characters in there to taint the copied value in some detectable way.

Prompt in words, but expect the value in numbers, eg: "Twenty-five" and the box requires you to type "25"? At least this specific case, it would require you to type it.

yeah, that would possibly stop the copy and paste problem. to make it robust they would need to use a string of a few non-visible characters but that would fail if the browser's clipboard system doesn't copy them over for some kind of privacy initiative. might be another way it fails that I can't think of right now.

This is it I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758

I always copy-paste into that box as well, they should probably make at least an attempt at disabling pasting into it

Azure has the same when deleting a database just a verify this is the correct one by typing the db name

I heard of this technique, but unfortunately I don't see how it can be easily applied in software engineering/devops.

Also, I now realized that aviation checklists seem to tend to be done similarly with gestures - at least from what I saw on YouTube, not sure if that's representative or only used during education (?)

Spelling out loudly the command you are about to execute and explaining the reasoning behind it can help a lot too.

Ok, but am I to do it on every single command I do on my terminal? Or on which ones specifically? If the problem we're trying to solve is that I can sometimes overlook the "dangerous commands" among "safe ones", by definition of overlooking it won't work if I tell myself to "spell out the command only in case of the dangerous ones", no?

I'm honestly trying to think of the way how I could approach this for myself, just I don't see a clear solution yet that wouldn't require me to spell out everything I type in my terminal window.

“I’m removing that semicolon!” (Pointing)

Parent meant this sort of pointing.

https://t.co/TjfX5K54H7