It’s always more efficient and safer to develop and test on a dev build and then deploy to Production later.
The advantage of plugins is they are easily switched in and out. On dev you don’t even have to rebuild, just restart the server after changes.
The former, but thanks for the concern.
It wasn’t concern! It was hope that you did the latter and got away with it, as that is my inclination despite the wise advice against it 
11 posts were split to a new topic: How to fork a plugin that’s now in core