Claude Code Checkpoints
59 comments
·August 28, 2025tommyderami
Under the hood, is this simply checkpointing the files in the claude target folder or are you also checkpointing the claude context? One of my biggest pain points is after a few compactions/edits to claude.md and all of a sudden Claude has made a few mistakes and all the context window cruft of fixes it attempted and reverted actually seem to confuse it further and it would be nice to reset to a known happy place code & contextually and retry from there.
punnerud
Now it’s the files. Have been prototyping about keeping the context also, for an upcoming version.
Wowfunhappy
This is something I really wish was just built-in to Claude Code. I want it built in because I don't want to have to think about it beforehand. I should be able to jump back in conversation history and have the state of the code jump back with me, so it's restored to the same state it originally was at that point in the conversation.
(There does also need to be a way to jump back in the conversation history without reverting the code, there are times that is useful too!)
faangguyindia
Gemini cli already got this, it's disabled by default.
Ref: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/c...
andrewmutz
Cline gives you the ability to jump back to any point in the task. The three options are "Restore task", "restore files" and "restore task and files"
A common experience with these tools is that if you realize you want to change the direction you're heading, it's better to jump back to that point in the work and redo it than it is to try to redirect the tool from where you are. Here's a great post about it on the Cline blog
https://cline.bot/blog/how-i-learned-to-stop-course-correcti...
punnerud
Hi, the developer here. Already thinking about a way to add it as a background task that can communicate with multiple instances at once. As long as its part of CLAUDE.md, every new project would have it automatically included. Not part of Claude Code, but a good way closer?
block_dagger
Cursor has had this for a long time. One of the reasons I don’t switch away.
kristianp
This was a pain point in coming from Aider to CC. How to have diffs of the changes once CC has done the changes? Having git commits done the way Aider does it would have saved me a lot of time.
CuriouslyC
You can prompt claude code to do that, or use hooks. You can run lint/test/commit automatically on agent stop.
black_knight
Yes, but the convenience of aider’s /undo might take quite some work to replicate.
emilecantin
I tend to have auto-accept on for edits, and once Claude is done with a task I'll just use git to review and stage the changes, sometimes commit them when it's a logical spot for it.
I wouldn't want to have Claude auto-commit everything it does (because I sometimes revert its changes), nor would I want to YOLO it without any git repo... This seems like a nice tool, but for someone who has a very different workflow.
punnerud
"Checkpoints for Claude Code" use git under the hood, but stored in .claudecheckpoints folder, to not mess with your own git. Add itself to .gitignore. It auto commits with a git message for the changes done through MCP locally.
michaelmior
As someone who doesn't use CC, auto-commit seems like it would be the easiest way to manage changes. It's easy enough to revert or edit a commit if I don't like what happened.
emilecantin
It's also very easy to throw away unstaged changes, and to stage exactly what you want. I treat the staging process ("git add") as a code review.
fastball
It's also very easy to throw away actual commits, as long as you don't push them (and even then not so difficult if you're in a context where force-pushing is tolerable).
radarsat1
I don't know what this is but isn't git enough? Incidentally I'm not convinced in my day-to-day for "jujitsu" (jj) but from what I understand about how it works, I've been wanting to give it a try for agent-based coding, based on the way it defaults to saving everything and letting you sort it out after. I do like how Aider commits everything so you can easily roll back, although it ends up with a few too many commits imho.
I've been wanting to experiment also with getting an agent to go back and rebase history, rewrite commits etc in the context of where the project ended up, to make a more legible history, but I don't know if that's doable, or even all that useful.
mhast
Git won't catch new files the agent is adding. To get around that you can of course always add all new files, but then you'll potentially have your repo polluted with a bunch of temporary scratch files instead.
You can typically go back and edit git history. But it will require force push and breaking changes. And a few sacrifices to ensure that it doesn't make a mistake because then your repo is potentially broken.
Best way to do that is probably to have it work on branches and then squash merge those.
fprotthetarball
> Git won't catch new files the agent is adding.
Another problem I inadvertently dodged by using Jujutsu with Claude Code :)
I tend to send a lone "commit" message to Claude when I think I'm in a spot I may want to return to in the future, in case the current path doesn't work out. Then Claude commits it with a decent message. It knows how to use jj well enough for most things. Then it's really easy to jj new back to a previous change and try again.
black_knight
I always squash and reorganise the commits from aider. It is however awesome that everything is in git directly from the agent. I can’t imagine why not all these tools do this!
fluidcruft
You could also create a branch, save your intermediates there, and then squash merge when you are ready.
winter_blue
Yup, that's what I do. Even for personal projects, with the flurry of changes Claude/other AI assistants make, a branch makes it easier for me to compare changes.
Often I have a branch with multiple commits on it, with each commit corresponding to a message in a conversation with AI on Cursor trying to get a new feature built.
In the end, I can diff the branch against the main branch, and see the sum total of changes the AI agent has made.
Maybe edit/improve manually on my own afterwards. And then, merge.
skapadia
Exactly. This is precisely what I do.
mfenniak
I don't think jujutsu woild help with this use case -- jujutsu will not save everything because it is not running constantly on your repo. It snapshots the working tree only when you run a `jj` command. Ineffective if an agent is doing work.
adobrawy
You can use Claude hooks ( https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/hooks#stop-an... ) to trigger jj / git automatically.
jtickle
I recently started using Aider and had that thought about too many commits. What I realized though was: (1) if I'm going to contribute to a project, I should be working in a local branch and interactively rebasing to clean up my history anyway (and of course carefully reviewing Aider's work first) and (2) if I'm working on my own thing WITHOUT LLM, I tend to prefer to commit every dang little change anyway, I just don't remember to do it because I'm in the zone and then inevitably wish I had at some point.
hoppp
Yea but then you need need to commit each iteration of each file right away, even if its not working.
Its fine if you just rebase at the end manually, but not good if you don't, your history will be cluttered and as hard to read as the codebase.
Eventually most people who use coding tools will have low knowledge of what is being generated and then they probably never rebase either...
endymion-light
i love the process of AI vibe coding slowly re-inventing the normal structures of software development
how long until we start seeing software products for scrum management and t-shirt size estimation for claude code
introduce waterfall methodology to the LLM!
usmanmehmood55
And soon enough it would need a project manager and HR to keep all the agents in line.
endymion-light
I hope the future becomes AI b2b sass agents selling b2b sass to other agents, just tools buying tools that in turn buy other tools ad infinitum
CuriouslyC
T shirt estimation doesn't make any sense for AI dev, not one bit. They get epic long features done in hours, and all the shirt sizing comes from cases where the agent circles the drain and needs to be guided, which isn't predictable.
The shirt sizes now are for manual acceptance testing.
endymion-light
My experience with AI tooling is that while it's really useful and great - I don't think i've ever seen a LLM complete an epic long feature well full stop.
Don't get me wrong, it's definitely improved my workflow and efficiency, but you must be winning at roulette if the model is performing well on anything that can't be googled and implemented witihn a similar amount of time.
unless it's claude, where even simple styling changes seem to become epics just when it wants to spit out an extra few thousands lines of code
CuriouslyC
If you go back and forth with chatgpt/gemini on architectural details first, then get chatgpt to produce a hyper detailed spec (like, almost a program claude can execute), you can get claude to run for 2-3 hours at a shot (particularly with a hook to prevent early stopping). Require >85% test coverage, and bake very clear e2e test paths into the spec, and Claude can come surprisingly close to one shotting big things.
js8
> T shirt estimation doesn't make any sense for AI dev
It doesn't make sense for NI (natural intelligence) dev, either. Even SCRUM doesn't make much sense. The only Agile thing that really makes sense is Kanban, which is actually known to computer science as dispatch queue.
In the 60s, OS researchers spent time figuring out how to optimally schedule resources for computation. Today, almost nobody uses these techniques. (This is known as "waterfall" in PM parlance.)
It turns out, the cheapest way to schedule computing resources is a simple dispatch queue. Why spend extra time figuring out in what order things need to be done, or how long they will take, if they need to be done anyway? It never made sense and it doesn't matter whether the agent is NI or AI.
Cheer2171
If Claude Code LLMs are reportedly so good, then why is the Claude Code CLI such a buggy, messy, featureless disaster? Are they dogfooding?
heeton
Eesh, a disaster? I use it daily to do some pretty impressive things. Wouldn’t call it a disaster.
neutronicus
Some of the user interaction borders on "disaster" IMO. One puts up with it because it's not a show-stopper for the core value proposition of the software (an LLM agent completing tasks for you), and the core value proposition of the software is really valuable.
The noticeable issues are (1) unpredictable scrolling of the terminal window and (2) a super-buggy text box for inputting the prompt.
In particular if I mash the arrow key too fast while moving around and editing the prompt CC and my terminal's idea of where the cursor is get out of sync somehow and it's tricky to get them re-aligned, and I can't actually input text until I do. The vim mode lets me bypass this but it has its own bugs and is missing a ton of features that I expect. Visual selection in particular seems to be missing? Not entirely certain what things I'm used to are stock vim features vs Spacemacs features but I'm pretty sure visual mode is the former. Regardless, only the very basics seem to actually work. "w", "b", "e", "cw/b/e", "dw/b/e", "esc/i".
So for the most part I actually just edit CC prompts in emacs and paste them.
I resort to this workaround because I am very motivated to use Claude Code. For a less-useful piece of software I would probably just give up.
furyofantares
I really love Claude Code but it's wild to me if others aren't seeing this.
Is Ctrl+R usable at all? I've given up on it, the whole screen just starts scrolling madly most of the time. Not that I have to press Ctrl+R to get that bug to happen, it's just the most reliable way to do so.
And I've had the input box stuck not accepting input or not allowing me to delete past a certain point a hundred times. By now I know how to get it unstuck (although I couldn't tell you - my fingers figured it out but my brain doesn't know).
jasonjmcghee
I've built terminal applications and when not using a dedicated alternate buffer, things like multiline text input and navigation are so easy to screw up. Not to mention when you have to do all the tricks to properly detect key strokes, pastes, etc. It's a mess of printing special codes and carriage returns.
I'm guessing they're using abstraction of some sort, but imo they've done a lot of great features and definitely usable.
That being said- they could just build / use something more like a jupyter notebook and have a wildly more stable and rich experience. Or a classic tui app, but pros and cons.
dbbk
This is a funny comment because it's just made up
CuriouslyC
While disaster is strong language, Claude Code isn't really a well engineered product, they're just kinda trying shit, they don't have a clear long term vision. The core prompts and agent loop are good though, it's too bad it's not open source so someone could implement them in a client with good UX/engineering (at least without disassembling claude code and being legally questionable).
epolanski
By which metric is it a disaster? Seems quite solid and impressive to me as it is.
neutronicus
I replied to a sibling comment with my observations - the upshot is the actual user interaction is quite buggy in my experience.
If you typically compose prompts in a separate editor and paste them in you aren't likely to even notice. But it's the kind of thing that would drive me up the wall in a piece of software whose primary function was less impressive.
punnerud
Hi, the developer here. Its a very early version so there could be a lot of bugs, but I like to use it myself (already found several bugs and updated version soon on its way). Switching from Cursor to Claude Code this was the biggest loss. Have tried to improve on the Cursor functionality, with features I missed.
I would love any feedback on what you are missing etc
felixgallo
Are you aware of trademark law?
punnerud
Yes, tried to make it clear that this is Checkpoints for Claude Code. An addition to Claude Code.
pjm331
Not to trivialize the work being done here but isn’t this as simple as a hook on edit and write tool calls that commits to git? I’m not sure I see the need for a whole app around this vs just the standard git workflow
myflash13
Interesting to watch the explosion of projects, even whole startups, which are just a feature addition to Claude Code. Shows how beloved it has become.
adds68
Great idea, but i've set it up and the app is pretty unusable for me, there is some sort of blocking process which runs every few seconds and freezes the UI, so you can interact with it properly
punnerud
Strange, tested on MacBook Pro M3, Pro Intel and MacBook Air M1. All with different OS versions. Straight after the MCP connection setup this happens?
null
This is fantastic, but a very spicy business. All Claude needs to do is add one feature and you've got your whole business nuked from orbit.