Building an Undo Button for AI-Assisted Coding
The author lost 3 hours of work due to an AI coding assistant (Claude Code) refactoring their code, leading them to build 'snaprevert' - a tool that automatically snapshots code changes and allows for easy rollback.
Why it matters
This tool addresses a common problem with AI coding assistants, where a lack of undo functionality can lead to significant productivity loss when the AI makes breaking changes.
Key Points
- 1AI coding assistants like Claude Code lack an undo feature between prompts, leading to issues when the AI makes breaking changes
- 2snaprevert is a tool that silently snapshots code changes and allows for selective rollback to previous versions
- 3snaprevert provides additional features like per-file rollback, interactive review, and AI tool detection
Details
The author was working on their project when Claude Code made significant changes to their auth module, breaking the app. They realized they had not committed their code in over an hour, and spent 3 hours manually reconstructing the last working state. This experience led them to build snaprevert, a tool that automatically snapshots code changes at the filesystem level every time files are modified. snaprevert stores diffs, not full copies, making it lightweight and efficient. It provides features like selective rollback, interactive review, and AI tool detection to help developers undo the impact of AI-assisted coding gone wrong. The author argues that snaprevert is complementary to Git, providing a continuous autosave between meaningful commits.
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