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by Myrmornis 36 days ago
> I typed :rs pods to switch back to the pods view. Nothing rendered. The table was empty... > now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it.

Hey I don't want to over simplify, I'm sure it was complicated, but did the author have functional tests for these broken views? As long as there are functional tests passing on the previous commit I'd have thought that claude could look at the end situation and work out how to get the desired feature without breaking the other stuff.

TUIs aren't an exception, it's still essential to have a way to end-to-end test each view.

1 comments

The problem wasn't the view didn't work. The problem was the view didn't work after something else had been done.

You can't test every permutation of app usage. You actually need good architechture so you can trust your test and changes to be local with minimal side-effects.

> The problem was the view didn't work after something else had been done.

In that situation you have two choices:

1. Tell claude to iterate until the tests for the new view and the old views are all passing.

2. git reset --hard back to the previous commit at which all tests are passing and tell claude to try again, making sure not to break any tests.

It's essential to use tests when vibecoding anything non trivial. Almost certainly in a TDD style.