Checkpoints and /rewind – your safety net

Claude has an idea. A really big one. Twenty minutes later half the service has been rebuilt, and all I want is the state from before.

The good news: Claude Code creates checkpoints automatically. Before each of your messages, it remembers the state of the files Claude edits.

⏪ Rewinding

Press Esc twice or type /rewind. You'll see your previous messages, pick a point and decide:

• Restore only the code, keep the conversation.
• Restore only the conversation, keep the code.
• Restore both.

💡 My favourite trick

Restore the code, keep the conversation. Claude still knows what didn't work, and the code is clean again: “That was the wrong path. Now try approach B.”

That makes experimenting cheap. “Build the component with signals instead of RxJS” no longer takes courage. If you don't like it, it's gone in seconds.

A word of caution:

Checkpoints only track what Claude changes through its own file tools. Anything done via shell commands (rm, mv, database migrations) won't be undone. Neither will changes you make in your editor at the same time. Checkpoints are a safety net, not a replacement for Git.

My rule of thumb:

• For the next few minutes? Checkpoints.
• For the next few years? Git.
• For parallel experiments? Worktrees (part 8).