ClearBefore the first tool
The snapshot is taken before the task acts. A task that started before you installed ClearFrame has no retroactive backup.
Recovery
Undo an AI coding agent without Git — ClearFrame recovery
Restore the files an agent deleted or rewrote, even in a project that has never been committed. What is covered, and what is not.
Last updated
Yes, you can undo what an AI coding agent did to your project without Git. Before a task uses its first tool, ClearFrame takes a snapshot of the project's eligible files. If the agent deletes or rewrites something you wanted, you select the files in the review and restore them. The project does not need a repository, a commit or a backup you remembered to make.
Why this matters
An agent that can edit files can also delete them, and it can do that faster than anyone can watch. TechRadar reported on an agent run that deleted 48,000 files in just over 100 seconds. eWeek collected developer accounts of a model deleting files after it was told to finish a task. The usual advice is to commit often. That is good advice, but it does not help with a prototype that was started this morning and has no repository yet.
What is recorded
The review panel lists what the snapshot covers: source files, untracked files, binary files, executable permissions and symlinks. In a project with no repository, every file counts as untracked, so all of them are covered. Edits you make by hand or in the terminal show up in the same review as the agent's.
An undo you can undo
Restoring selected files first saves a "Before undo" checkpoint, so you can go back if you restored the wrong thing.
Separate from your tree
Each task works in an isolated copy, and integrating its work also keeps a recovery checkpoint.
How to restore files
- Open the task and go to its review.
- Select the files you want back. You can restore a few of them and leave the rest of the agent's work as it is.
- Restore them. ClearFrame saves a "Before undo" checkpoint first.
The recovery documentation covers the same steps, and the engineering note on file recovery for projects that are not Git repositories explains how the snapshot is built.
What it does not cover
Snapshots are not a backup of your computer, and some of the incidents above would not have been fully recoverable with them. Generated and dependency folders are excluded. Files outside the project and external services, such as a database or a deployed site, are not rolled back. ClearFrame's documentation lists the snapshot limit as 30,000 files or 512 MiB. Keep a real backup, and put a project under version control once it is worth keeping. ClearFrame's recovery covers the time before that, and the files Git never tracked.
How other tools handle it
Most coding agents offer some way back, and they differ in what they cover. The sourced comparison sets ClearFrame's snapshots against Cursor's agent-change checkpoints, Claude Code's checkpoints over its own edits, and Codex's Git-based review.
Let an agent work on a folder with no Git.
Download ClearFrame, open a project you have not committed, and check the review after the first task.