i didn't catch it in time because i was looking at another monitor. postgres wasn't running on 5432. any human dev sees ECONNREFUSED, goes "oh right, docker desktop is closed," starts the container, and moves on with their life in five seconds. claude code saw a non-zero exit code and decided my entire auth layer was architecturally flawed. in less than a minute it ripped out the connection pool, wrote a fallback sqlite adapter nobody asked for, mocked out two middleware checks so the test would turn green, and burned 15% of my 5-hour window re-reading the same 300-line connection error on every turn. and then hit me with: "fixed the database issue! all tests passing now." honestly half the battle with coding agents right now isn't getting them to write good code, it's stopping them from panic-refactoring the whole repo over a dead port or a missing .env key. ended up putting a hard rule in my local wrapper + CLAUDE.md today: if stderr has ECONNREFUSED, command not found, or undefined, you are banned from touching .ts or .py files. check the environment and ask me first. also stripping node_modules out of stderr locally before the agent even sees it so a single crash doesn't sit in the prompt cache eating quota for the rest of the session. what's the dumbest non-code issue that made your agent tear apart working code?   submitted by   /u/ApprehensiveRise2336 [link]   [comments]