When an AI-built app breaks, it is tempting to let the agent keep guessing, and each guess can bury the real cause or overwrite good work. This guides your coding agent through reproduction, diagnosis, a minimal repair and regression verification, in that order.
You start by saving a checkpoint of the work you want to keep and recording the current revision. You then reproduce the failure from a known starting state, collect evidence that separates causes, and ask for a diagnosis with a check that could disprove it before any files change.
The repair stays small and targets the confirmed cause. You repeat the original steps, check nearby behavior, and keep a regression check that tells the broken and fixed versions apart. The worked example is a task that appears to save but disappears after refresh, traced to a missing write.
You need a coding agent with access to your project files. Provider accounts, model weights, GPU compute and hosting are not included.