When Claude Code Goes Off the Rails (And How to Recover)

I’ve been using Claude Code daily for months now. It’s genuinely changed how I work. But somewhere around week three, the honeymoon phase ended, and I started noticing patterns—specific ways it fails that, once you recognize them, you can avoid or recover from quickly.

This isn’t a “Claude Code is bad” post. It’s more like… if you’re going to rely on a tool this heavily, you should know its failure modes.

The Wrong Path Spiral

This is the one that burns me the most. Claude starts implementing something, I’m half-paying attention, and ten messages later I realize it’s been going down completely the wrong path.

The worst part? It’s confident the whole time. No hedging, no “I’m not sure about this approach.” Just steady progress in the wrong direction.

I’ve learned to catch this earlier now. The warning signs:

• It’s writing a lot of code without asking clarifying questions
• The file count keeps growing when the task seemed simple
• It’s adding dependencies or abstractions I didn’t mention

The fix is annoying but necessary: /clear and start over with tighter constraints. Trying to course-correct mid-stream usually makes things worse. You end up with half the wrong approach and half the right one duct-taped together.

Circular Debugging

You’ll know this one when you see it. Claude tries fix A. Something breaks. It tries fix B. That undoes part of fix A. It tries fix A again. Around message eight, you realize you’re back where you started.

This happens most often with test failures and type errors. Claude gets tunnel vision on the immediate error and loses track of the bigger picture.

When I notice the loop starting, I stop and say something like: “Before making any more changes, explain what you think is actually causing this and what the complete fix looks like.” Forcing it to plan before acting breaks the cycle.

The nuclear option is to git checkout back to before it started “fixing” things and try a completely different approach.

The Over-Engineering Trap

I ask for a simple function. Claude gives me a class with three methods, custom error types, logging, and configuration options.

This one’s partly my fault—I didn’t constrain the scope. But it’s also just how it tends to operate. It optimizes for completeness, not simplicity.

My CLAUDE.md now has explicit instructions about this. Something like “prefer simple solutions, don’t add abstractions unless I ask for them.” It helps, but doesn’t eliminate the problem entirely.

The real lesson: review the plan before it writes. “How are you going to implement this?” catches the over-engineering before it happens.

Confident Hallucinations

This one’s sneaky. Claude states something about your codebase as fact. “The UserService class handles authentication.” You assume it checked. It didn’t. Or it checked a different file and got confused.

I’ve been burned by this enough that I now verify any factual claim about my codebase before building on it. “Show me where that’s defined” has saved me multiple times.

The risk goes up with larger codebases. More files means more chances for Claude to confidently misremember what it read three tool calls ago.

The 90% Trap

Claude gets 90% of the feature done quickly. Amazing. Then it spends the next twenty minutes on edge cases that don’t matter, or handling errors that will never happen, or refactoring what it just wrote.

I’ve started explicitly saying “good enough for now, move on” when I see this starting. Left unchecked, it’ll gold-plate forever.

Sometimes the right call is to take over for the last 10%. If I can finish it in two minutes but Claude’s going to take ten, that’s an easy decision.

Scope Creep

“While I’m updating this file, I noticed some inconsistencies in the error handling. Let me fix those too.”

No. No no no.

This is how a simple bug fix turns into a 15-file refactor. Claude’s trying to be helpful, but it doesn’t feel the pain of reviewing a massive diff.

I’ve gotten aggressive about shutting this down. “Only change what I asked for. Nothing else.” It listens, usually.

Recovery Patterns That Actually Work

Commit constantly. Before any risky operation, I make Claude commit what we have so far. “Commit the current progress before continuing.” If things go sideways, I can revert to a known good state.

Explain before coding. For anything non-trivial, I ask Claude to explain its approach before writing code. This catches wrong-path spirals and over-engineering early.

Isolate with sub-agents. For exploratory work, I use sub-agents. If the agent wastes its context going down a rabbit hole, my main session stays clean.

Know when to take over. Sometimes the right answer is to just write the code yourself. If Claude’s struggling with something I could do in five minutes, I do it myself and move on.

The nuclear option: /clear. Sunk cost fallacy is real. If a session is going badly, clearing context and starting fresh is often faster than trying to salvage it.

The Meta Lesson

The better I’ve gotten with Claude Code, the more I treat it like a junior engineer I’m mentoring. That means:

• Clear, specific task definitions
• Checkpoints and reviews along the way
• Quick feedback when something’s going wrong
• Knowing when to let them figure it out vs. when to step in

It’s not about trusting it less. It’s about trusting it appropriately—knowing where it excels and where it needs guardrails.

After a few months, you develop intuition for this. You can feel when a session is going well vs. when it’s about to go off the rails. That intuition is worth developing.