Editing Safely

Skill level: Complete beginner

Nothing you change in Kivo is permanent if you keep checkpoints. These habits make every edit safe to try, whether you edit by hand or with AI.

The Safe Editing Loop

1. Run the site with npm run dev, so you see each change as soon as you save.
2. Change one thing, save, and look at the page.
3. Check both color modes with the sun/moon button, and make the window narrow to see the phone layout.
4. Save a checkpoint when it works (see below).
5. Repeat.

Small steps make problems easy to find: if the page breaks, it was the last change.

Save Checkpoints With Git

In VS Code’s Source Control panel (or the terminal):

git add .
git commit -m "Change hero text and brand color"

• See what changed since the last checkpoint: click a file in the Source Control panel. Removed lines are red, added lines are green.
• Undo changes to one file: right-click it in Source Control and choose Discard Changes.
• Undo everything since the last checkpoint: git restore . in the terminal.

No git? Copy the whole kivo project folder (without node_modules/) before a big change, and name the copy with the date.

Before You Change Code

Content files are hard to break. Components and styles are easier to break and harder to fix. Before you edit anything in src/layouts/ or src/styles/:

• check whether the change can be made in a content file or config.toml instead (it usually can)
• save a checkpoint
• run npm run astro-check afterwards

Run The Checks

npm run astro-check   # finds mistakes in code and in content files that have a schema
npm run build         # builds the full site, as your host will

Run both before every deploy. Stop npm run dev first, and run them one after the other, not at the same time.

astro-check doesn’t check the section, contact, FAQ, and pricing files, so the safe editing loop above (look at the page after each change) is your check for those. If npm run build prints a [site] warning, set baseUrl in config.toml before you deploy.