Been vibe coding a SaaS app for about 4 months using Claude Code. Not a traditional developer. I describe what I want, Claude builds it, I iterate. It works great until the project gets complex enough that Claude starts breaking things. The pattern that was killing me: I ask Claude to add a settings page. It builds a beautiful settings page. But in the process it quietly changes how the auth middleware works. Now the dashboard is broken and I have no idea why because I didn’t ask it to touch the dashboard. I spend an hour going back and forth trying to fix the dashboard and by the end the settings page is broken too. This happened to me probably 20 times before I figured out what was actually going on. Claude doesn’t know which parts of your project are connected. When you say “add a settings page,” it reads a bunch of files trying to figure out your project. Some of those files are relevant. Most aren’t. But it reads them all and then makes decisions based on everything it read, including stuff that has nothing to do with settings. That’s why it touches files you didn’t ask it to touch. 3 things that stopped this from happening: Before you ask Claude to build anything, ask it what it would need to touch first. Just say “I want to add a settings page. Before you write any code, tell me which files you would need to read or change.” If the list includes files that shouldn’t be involved, tell it to leave them alone. This one tip alone saved me hours of debugging. Tell Claude what NOT to touch. I started adding “do not modify any files outside of src/settings/ and src/components/SettingsPanel.jsx” to every prompt. Sounds obvious but I never did it before and Claude was just wandering through my entire project making “improvements” I didn’t ask for. Give Claude something that already knows how your files connect. I tried a few tools for this. claude-context does semantic search across your codebase which helps find relevant code. caveman gives Claude a simple memory between sessions. But the one that actually fixed the “breaks other things” problem for me was vexp because it maps the dependency graph so Claude can see what’s connected to what before it starts changing stuff. The combination of knowing which files matter AND how they depend on each other is what made the difference. Tips 1 and 2 work right now for free. The tools in tip 3 are all free to try. Is this happening to everyone or just me? submitted by /u/icedtumblr
Originally posted by u/icedtumblr on r/ClaudeCode