I have been using Claude Code directly in my terminal for several months as part of my daily Full Stack development workflow. It has significantly boosted my speed when refactoring code, writing unit tests, and building feature boilerplates.
However, working with autonomous AI agents comes with a learning curve. A few days ago, while prompting Claude Code to execute a refactoring task, something went wrong during a git operation, and a recent commit with unpushed changes seemed to vanish.
If you use AI assistants in your terminal, you will eventually face a moment where the agent overrules or overwrites something unexpectedly. Here is what happened and how I recovered my code in under two minutes.
While working on a feature, I asked Claude Code to perform a multi-file refactor and handle the commit process. Due to a context mismatch in the terminal execution, the recent local commit was detached, leaving my working directory in an unexpected state without the updated changes.
My immediate reaction was to check git reflog, but since the changes hadn’t been fully tracked in the branch head yet, the standard Git safety net wasn’t enough.
That’s when Claude Code itself suggested a feature built right into Visual Studio Code: Local History.
VS Code automatically tracks local revisions of your files every time you save them, independent of Git commits or stashes. This timeline acts as an extra safety net when local files are overwritten by external scripts, CLI commands, or AI agents.
Here is how to access and restore your files:
Tip: You can also right-click any timestamp in the Timeline panel to compare that specific version directly against your current file state.
Working with AI tools in the CLI requires adopting a few defensive habits:
Have you ever lost code while working with an AI CLI tool? How do you manage safety nets in your developer workflow?