Claude Code removed a stale file by running a shell command. You decide you wanted it after all and reach for rewind. What happens?

The principle — coverage is decided by which tool made the change, not by when it happened.

Why the key is correct — Anthropic is explicit that checkpointing does not track files modified by bash commands, and that only direct file edits made through Claude's file editing tools are tracked. A deletion carried out by a shell command therefore leaves no restore point behind, and rewinding will not notice it is missing. This is the single most useful limitation to know, because the failure is silent: the rewind reports success, other changes do come back, and the deleted file simply stays gone.

Why the others are wrong — being inside the session is not the test, since the tracked set is defined by the tool rather than the timeframe. There is no whole-tree snapshot to recover from, because snapshots are taken per file just before an editing tool touches it. And a rewind does not undo everything from a prompt; it reverses the tracked edits and leaves untracked ones exactly where they are.

Remember this — if it happened through the shell, git is your recovery route, not rewind.

Sources — Anthropic's checkpointing page.