"AI started actively breaking working code" is vibe coding talk, you should monitor what it does and undo at the step that breaks. I've been able to do that just by prompting "undo last step/<specific action>"

I used it before as a free Claude Code to do ad-hoc scripting, pretty useful. Now I have found a bunch of TUI programs (Amazon Q, rovo dev, opencode) that can assist with that kind of workflow. I don't like that it's a GUI app, but I like the fact that it's a terminal app where I can type command directly into, not just prompt. Claude 4 should be fine, was on free, never hit limit so not sure what's the lite experience is.

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iudqnolq 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've found Claude to be terrible at undoing.

It feels analogous to what would happen if you put me in front of a broken project without source control that I've never seen before and asked me to fix it without giving me enough time to actually understand it. It starts from errors and bugs, guesses corresponding source code, and tries to narrowly fix just that snippet. Generally it favors deleting, but not specifically deleting new code.

I would have thought it could record a log of its actions and use that log to think about undoing. I would also think it could annotate lines with git blame so it knows undoing wouldn't involve changing anything more than say a day old. Unfortunately that isn't consistent with what I've seen.

I just make a WIP git commit and run git commit -A --amend --no-edit after manually reviewing each unit of work.

Edit: I also wish Claude implemented undo at a higher level instead of relying on the model. Some combination of snapshotting the whole repo and tracking operations that have precise inverses. But I understand that would have drawbacks.

	▲	nsonha 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		maybe a system prompt to tell it to do checkpoints. Stash is one way, another is jujutsu with git backend. If this was Claude Code then hooks would be the perfect place to put that logic.

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beng-nl 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree - people saying that kind of stuff I just can’t take seriously. Programmers know to use revision control systems, practically from the start of their being programmers. For the same reason: because you can break your own code. Not using a vcs when letting ai make changes just doesn’t make sense at all. And them complaining ai broke their code means they broke their code.