Never log into your production servers via shell? This seems a tad over the top.. especially if you are planning on writing a script to perform operations and need to discover dependencies / etc.
There's a pretty handy tool I use now (fabric: docs.fabfile.org) that makes it pretty simple.
My point is, your method of "never logging into a production server" is extreme. You could have easily written a script for this and then by accident, executed it on the production server instead of on a testing server. Same problem manifests itself in a different manner.