Ask Claude for state diagrams when its explanations get hard to follow
Long explanations hide failure behaviour, so one builder started asking Claude for state diagrams grounded in the project's own recorded decisions and gotchas, with inspectable sources. The diagrams cover pauses, retries and saved files rather than just the happy path. The technique transfers beyond the author's tool: a diagram of failure branches is a debugging instrument, and asking what state the system is left in after each failure usually surfaces the real bug.