Claude Code Windows encoding and path pitfalls
I have been using Claude Code on a Windows 11 company laptop for about 15 months. While the AI's coding logic rarely fails, I repeatedly hit a wall regarding encoding and file paths—the classic traps of a Korean Windows environment. Using PowerShell for text manipulation is a recipe for disaster. I tried using Get-Content and Set-Content to edit files, but the Korean characters broke. Even using Add-Content with explicit UTF-8 encoding didn't help; in July, I had to manually rewrite Korean text in a Python docstring because of this. The worst part was redirection: using echo with >> to append a line to a config file converted the entire file to UTF-16 and injected NUL characters, crashing the app on startup. There is also a distinction between "looking broken" and "being broken." Once, Claude saw garbled Korean text in its own PowerShell output and tried to fix the console encoding, thinking it was a product bug. In reality, the file was perfec...