When AI fixes keep breaking your app: five questions to answer next

The freeCodeCamp tutorial by Amir Gabay, published 5 October 2026 describes the fix loop of AI coding agents: something breaks in an app built with an agent, you ask the agent to fix it, and the bug is still there or a second bug appears. The tutorial says this is not a quirk of one product.

The Claude Code documentation, best-practices page says that if you have corrected Claude more than twice on the same issue in one session, you should start fresh with a more specific prompt.

As advice, a fresh, more specific prompt is the first thing to try after a fix does not hold. If the same kind of failure keeps coming back, use the five questions below as a rule of thumb for deciding what to do next.

Copy this checklist into a notes app or a document, answer each question with yes or no, and count the yeses.

1. Does fixing one thing break something nearby?
2. Has a bug you already fixed come back?
3. Is there nothing, such as an automated test (a script that checks a feature for you), that tells you whether the app still works after a change?
4. Would you struggle to say, in two sentences, what the tool changed in its last fix?
5. Do real users, money or personal data now depend on the app?

The Claude Code documentation lists tests, scripts and screenshots as forms of verification and says: “If you can’t verify it, don’t ship it.” Question 3 asks whether anything of that kind exists for your app.

What to do with the score:

• 0 yeses: keep prompting, and save a restore point (a version you can go back to) before each change.
• 1 yes, or 2 yeses without question 5: pause. Save a copy of the project, write down which questions got a yes, and ask the tool to write a test for what just broke before it changes anything else.
• Any other combination (3 or more yeses, or 2 yeses that include question 5): have an engineer look before the next change.

Next step

Sources

Retrieved on 10 October 2026: freeCodeCamp tutorial by Amir Gabay, 5 October 2026; Claude Code documentation, best-practices page, no date shown.