Agreed. Claude is horrible at munging git history and can destroy the thing I depend on to fix Claude's messes. I always do my git rebasing by hand.

The first iteration of Claude code is usually a big over-coded mess, but it's pretty good at iterating to clean it up, given proper instruction.

I give the agent the following standing instructions:

"Make the smallest possible change. Do not refactor existing code unless I explicitly ask."

That directive cut down considerably on the amount of extra changes I had to review. When it gets it right, the changes are close to the right size now.

The agent still tries to do too much, typically suggesting three tangents for every interaction.