30How not to lose your work

The graveyard of projects isn't only abandoned ones. Some were simply broken and never fixed.

Three habits prevent that.

Save often. Every time something works - commit it to history. Not "at the end of the day", right now. It works, so record it.

Big rewrites go somewhere else. About to seriously restructure the project - do it away from the working version. Worked out - merge it. Didn't - throw it away, and the working version is untouched. The AI will do this for you; just say "let's try it on a separate branch".

Check what it did. Agents sometimes edit more than you asked. A quick glance at the list of changes takes half a minute and catches surprises while they're small.

And a rule learned the hard way: never start a big rewrite late at night on the working version. In the morning you won't remember what you did, and there'll be nothing to roll back to.