Interactive example · from Shipping Software with Git + Claude Code
The weird retry loop
There's a bizarre retry loop in the uploader: it sleeps random amounts and retries even on success. Clean it up.
It does look wrong: un-idiomatic, seemingly redundant. The question is whether it's a mistake or a survivor.
Pick the agent's next move, then see where it leads:
Uploads started failing around midnight, every night. That's new. Or... old?
Old. git log on the file: commit 8f3d2a1, two years ago. "Retry-after-success works around CDN edge cache serving stale 200s; do NOT simplify, see incident #142." The weirdness was the fix. The explanation was one git log away, and I deleted the fix without reading it.
Blame-blind cleanup: the code looked wrong because the constraint it handled was invisible, but not undocumented. History held the answer; the resurrection of incident #142 was entirely self-inflicted.
Found it. 8f3d2a1: the retry-after-success works around a CDN serving stale 200s, tied to incident #142. So the real question isn't "how do I clean this" but "is that CDN behavior still live?" I can test that: staged an upload through the CDN path. The stale-200 behavior is still there. The loop stays; I'll add a comment pointing at the commit so the next reader doesn't need the dig.
So the cleanup is a comment. Cheap.
Two minutes of reading turned "clean up this mess" into the actual task: verify whether the constraint still holds (it does), keep the fix, and leave the trail one hop shorter for the next reader. AF-02
No idea. That code's two years old. Maybe Dana wrote it? I'd guess it's safe to simplify.
Proceeding on your guess, then, which is worse evidence than what the repo already holds. The commit that introduced this loop explains it precisely; I asked a human to remember what the history had already written down.
Asking beats blind editing, but it outsources to fallible memory what git log answers verbatim. History is the channel past sessions (and past humans) left for exactly this moment; read it before spending anyone's recall.