The Rewind Discipline

Use it for

Haiku-First, Sonnet-Mostly, Opus-Rarely

The prompt

[This is a USER discipline, not a prompt — but it pairs with the way you instruct Claude going forward.]

When Claude does something you didn't intend:

1. STOP. Do not type a correction into the next message.
2. Use the rewind feature (esc + arrow keys in Claude Code; equivalent in your interface) to delete everything after your last good instruction.
3. Now edit the original instruction itself. The reason Claude went sideways is almost always that the instruction was ambiguous, not that Claude was wrong. Make the instruction unambiguous.
4. Re-run. Claude is now starting clean from a corrected instruction, with no contaminated context from the wrong attempt.

The wrong move — and the one everyone defaults to — is appending "actually I meant…" to a thread that's already gone off the rails. That burns tokens, pollutes context, and almost never recovers cleanly.

Worked example

No worked example recorded yet.