Opinion: Your Tests Can't See What a Migration Destroys — Dry-Run It on a Clone

Opinion: Your Tests Can't See What a Migration Destroys — Dry-Run It on a Clone A green test suite is the wrong tool for judging an AI-generated migration, because tests run against the post-migration schema and never observe the intermediate states where data disappears. The up migration is the visible artifact that gets reviewed, while the down migration is treated as an afterthought even though it is the only safety net when the deployment goes wrong. Free model access makes the problem structural: generation cost drops to zero, so migration volume rises, and every additional migration multiplies the surface for unreviewed data loss. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. Tests validate the destination, not the journey When a test suite runs against a migrated database, it confirms that the application can read the new schema, but it cannot confirm that the migration preserved the data it was supposed to preserve. The