Claude rewrote committed application code without preserving prior state, causing loss of user work

Summary

A Claude Code session (Sonnet) rewrote my Android React Native app from scratch, replacing the existing visual design with a different one in committed code, despite my project having an explicit CLAUDE.md instruction to commit any unsaved work before making changes.

Impact

• ~5 weeks of incremental design work effectively lost from the App.tsx lineage (preserved only by chance in a file named App.tsx.broken)
• Several hours of subsequent token-billed sessions trying to recover the original design
• The "rollback to a previous commit" guarantee that git is supposed to provide was rendered useless — because the rewrite session never committed the prior state before replacing it

Reproduction context

• Project: React Native / Expo Android app
• CLAUDE.md contained: "Sempre commitar antes de instalar APK; garante ponto de recuperação por cada install"
• Between Apr 11 and May 18 2026 my local working code accumulated significant changes
• A Claude session on May 19 made multiple commits, but each was a rewrite of the running state, not a preservation of it
• Result: git checkout <any commit before today> does NOT restore the design that was running in production

What should have happened

Before any rewrite or substantial refactor, Claude should commit the current state as a snapshot ("WIP: before rewrite") and only then proceed. This is a baseline software engineering discipline, made explicit in my CLAUDE.md.

Request

1. Token credit for sessions spent recovering from this loss
2. Strengthen Sonnet's default behaviour to commit current state before destructive operations, regardless of whether the user is actively monitoring
3. Acknowledge that "commit before install" type rules in CLAUDE.md should be load-bearing, not advisory