Claude Code: Up and Running

Chapter 10. Review, Testing, Debugging, and Failure Recovery

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 10th chapter of the final book. The GitHub repo is active.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Claude Code can produce a great deal of code quickly, and that fundamentally changes the economics of software work. It does not repeal the oldest rule of software engineering, though: code is not done because it exists. It is done when it behaves correctly, remains understandable enough to maintain, and leaves behind evidence proportional to its risk.

At skyscraper scale, generating code is the easy part. Controlling long-term complexity is the real work. If an agent implements a feature today but hides its assumptions, weakens the tests, or leaves the docs describing yesterday’s behavior, it has not saved anyone time. It has deferred the work to whoever touches the system next, and increasingly that is another agent session with none of this one’s context. A sustainable workflow needs review, testing, debugging, and recovery habits that scale with the code. That is what this chapter is about.

Code Review and Evidence Governance

Most of this chapter is about review, ...