Break nothing with an AI: the three-net guide

An AI breaks fast, and does not know it

A coding AI changes dozens of files in seconds, confidently, and announces “done” without having checked. Most of the time, all is well. The rest of the time, you discover on Monday that what worked on Friday no longer does — and it does not even remember what it touched.

You do not make an AI infallible. You make its mistakes reversible and rare. Reversible through the first net, rare through the other two.

Net one — the project camera

A version tool photographs your entire project at every validated step. Something broke? One command, and you are back at the previous photo — the exact state, to the comma. You want to understand? The tool shows only the lines that changed between two photos.

It is the most important net of the three, the one that turns a disaster into a hiccup. Setup, the three-request how-to and the drill: back up before you let the AI work. Complete it with a copy of the project somewhere other than your machine — what exists in only one place only half exists.

Net two — the rules that make accidents rare

The photo repairs; the rules prevent. Three lines in your AI’s instruction sheet eliminate most breakage:

“Do not rewrite what works, unless I ask.” “Do what I ask, nothing more — flag the rest.” “Before changing more than one file, show me the plan and wait for my go-ahead.”

The third is the most powerful: a five-line plan lets you see the unrequested change coming before it is applied. How to write these rules so they hold: how to give instructions to a coding AI.

Net three — the barriers that block the irreparable

A written rule can be ignored. Not often — but a folder deletion does not need to happen often to cost weeks.

Hence the third net: automatic checks that run before every risky action and block it. Mass deletion, forced rewriting of history, wiping a database: refused before they happen, without asking the AI’s opinion. And for the cases where the block is a false positive — you genuinely want to delete that folder — the exit is healthy: you do it yourself. Irreversible actions belong to the human.

The day it breaks anyway

No system eliminates everything. When the day comes, the order of moves matters more than speed: stop changing things, go back to the last photo, look at what had changed, and only then ask for the change again — with a plan this time. The full walkthrough, including the no-version-tool case, is in my AI broke my site, how do I go back.

And the worst reflex remains the most natural one: typing “it is broken, fix it”. It does not remember the previous state — so it will invent a third version. Go back first, always.

The install order, to finish

If you do only one thing today: net one. It is the one that saves you when everything else has failed. The rules next, the barriers after. Under an hour in all, zero lines of code — and the next bad evening becomes a thirty-second step back.