What they did
A friend's Pixel 10 woke up on the recovery screen saying Android could not load, offering only a retry or a factory reset. The poster, u/Responsible_Cow2236, wanted to keep the data. They first worked through the problem in chat with Claude (Opus 5.5) from a photo of the screen: retrying and safe mode both booted, then froze to a black screen after unlock. For the third step they switched to Claude Code on their PC. It installed Google's adb tools, checked that the PC could see the phone, found the newest official Pixel 10 update package (Android 17, October 2026 build, about 3.3 GB), downloaded it from Google, verified its checksum and ran adb sideload, which rewrites the system files and leaves user data in place.
How it went
The sideload completed, but the phone still froze after unlock. The poster reads that as proof the system itself was fine. The friend then uninstalled a mobile game and the phone has worked since; the poster guesses the storage was nearly full. No data was lost. The fix itself was the uninstall, so the agent's part was ruling out the system and avoiding the wipe.
Worth knowing
Commenters pointed out a phone that reaches safe mode is not really bricked, and called this standard Android recovery. One asked how the game was removed if the phone froze after unlock, and the post does not say. A charge-only USB-C cable will not let the PC see the phone, and the red error lines on the sideload screen are expected.