Sometimes a session goes sideways. A few prompts in, Claude has made a series of changes built on a wrong turn, and each new instruction only piles more onto the shaky foundation. Rather than trying to untangle it step by step, rewind.
Claude Code lets you go back to an earlier point in the conversation with /rewind. You can also reach the rewind control by pressing Esc. Once there, you pick an earlier point and resume from it, dropping everything that came after.
Why this beats patching forward:
- A clean restart. Instead of "undo that, and also undo the other thing, and put the first file back," you jump straight back to when things were still good.
- No compounding mistakes. Fixes layered on a bad assumption tend to create new problems. Rewinding removes the bad assumption entirely.
- A chance to re-prompt better. You now know where it went wrong, so you can give a sharper instruction the second time.
A typical flow: you asked for a feature, Claude misunderstood the data model, and three prompts later the code is a tangle. Rewind to just before that first misstep, then try again with a clearer prompt:
/rewind
Then re-ask, this time spelling out the part it got wrong: "Comments belong to articles by ObjectId, not by slug. Build the relation on the id."
Rewind pairs well with the earlier habit of interrupting. Esc stops a wrong turn in progress; rewind undoes one you only noticed later. Together they mean a wrong path is never a dead end, just a checkpoint to go back to.
Treat it as a normal part of the loop, not an admission of failure. Trying a second time from a good starting point is often the quickest route to the right result.
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