Interrupt and rewind

The coding agent's controls stop it in the middle of a step and roll its changes back. They are how a person watching the work turns a drift into a correction.

Finding it

• Claude Code: Esc stops the current step; Esc twice, or /rewind, goes back to an earlier checkpoint.
• Other coding agents: checkpoints or snapshots of the files they edit.
• What checkpoints miss: changes made by shell commands (a migration, a file a script wrote) are not in them; git is the fallback.

Using it

• Interrupt early, when the direction is wrong, not after the step finishes.
• Follow with the correction as the next instruction: what was wrong, and what to do instead.
• Rewind the code, the conversation or both to before the step that drifted.
• Record the correction: one made twice should become a rule.

Examples: Esc and /rewind in Claude Code, checkpoints and snapshots in other coding agents.