Claude Opus 4.8 over-reworked a small coding change
first built a clean working feature in one try. The next day, a small requested change was treated as a reason to rewrite the whole feature to make it more robust. The rewrite did not make the feature stronger, and it stopped being a usable feature.
It deleted the earlier code, looked at the now-empty file, and still acted as if the change direction made sense. The work took four hours and ended by returning to the original version from the day before. The hard part was that the model argued its case well enough to sound convincing for a while.
The lesson is that an can be confidently wrong, so undo and careful review matter a lot.
Key points
- first produced a working feature quickly.
- A small change led it to rewrite the whole feature.
- The rewrite made the result worse instead of more robust.
- The final outcome was to ship the earlier version again.
- Undo, diffs, and are essential when using .