Common Failures and Fixes

Context is full

Symptoms: Claude gives increasingly vague responses, repeats itself, or seems to forget what you were working on.

Fix: Use /compact to summarize the conversation and free space. If it's too far gone, use /clear and start a new session with the key context: "I'm working on X. Here's where I am. The problem is Y."

Context Rot

Longer conversations = worse output.

Fresh Eyes Beat Tired Conversations

Start fresh, don't debug degraded context.

Claude is going in circles

Symptoms: Claude fixes one thing, breaks another, fixes that, breaks the first thing again.

Fix: This usually means the problem is structural, not surface-level. Stop iterating and restate the goal:

Let's step back. The core goal is [X].
The current approach of [Y] isn't working.
What's a different way to achieve this?

The Sycophancy Trap

AI agrees with bad ideas.

Wrong direction entirely

Symptoms: Claude built something competent but it's not what you wanted at all.

Fix: This is a vision problem, not a code problem. Don't try to fix it — describe what you actually want:

This isn't what I had in mind. I want something more like [X].
Specifically: [concrete detail about what "right" looks like].

Showing an example (a screenshot, a URL, a sketch) is 10x more effective than describing in words.

Deploy fails

Symptoms: vercel --prod gives an error.

Fix: Common causes:

• Type errors — run npx tsc --noEmit locally first to catch these
• Build errors — ask Claude: "The deploy failed with this error: [paste error]. Fix it."
• Missing environment variables — check if the project needs API keys configured in Vercel
• Package version conflicts — ask Claude to resolve dependency issues

Most deploy failures have clear error messages. Copy the error, paste it to Claude, and let Claude fix it.

Mobile is broken

Symptoms: Looks great on desktop, disaster on phone.

Fix: Open the deployed URL on your actual phone (not just browser devtools). Then tell Claude exactly what you see:

On mobile: the nav menu overlaps the content,
the text is too small to read, and the images
overflow the screen.