Lots of concepts. Release the harness that made it possible to port Bun to Rust in 9 days. That's what everyone really wants. Then everyone can go "do that but for this other goal".
How Claude Code works in large codebases
31–40 of 191 posts
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#32> Claude Code navigates a codebase the way a software engineer would: it traverses the file system, reads files, uses grep to find exactly what it needs, and follows references across the codebase. It operates locally on the developer’s machine and doesn’t require a codebase index to be built, maintained, or uploaded to a server.... > Agentic search avoids those failure modes. There's no embedding pipeline or central…
The article does have an entire paragraph about LSPs and how Claude can use them.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#33> Claude Code navigates a codebase the way a software engineer would: it traverses the file system, reads files, uses grep to find exactly what it needs, and follows references across the codebase. It operates locally on the developer’s machine and doesn’t require a codebase index to be built, maintained, or uploaded to a server.... > Agentic search avoids those failure modes. There's no embedding pipeline or central…
Even if there is first principles traversal of some parts of the codebase, there are other bits that definitely not change, and where exploring every time is a massive waste of tokens. My arguments with claude often have to do with making it explore a lot less, because I know better, and faster, than its slow, expensive navigation of things that basically never change. And it just goes into the same kind of rabbit holes every time.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#34How very interesting. In an industry, where things shift around in months if not weeks, there’s been not only enough time for clear patterns to emerge but also these patterns have proven successful on large codebases. What’s the success criteria? Didn’t delete production database? Team velocity has increased? Codebase TTL has increased? Operations guys are happier?
> Didn’t delete production database? I still say if this happens to you with AI tooling, that's both a failure on you and your org for giving a developer prod credentials that could nuke production resources. I don't think I've worked in a place that gave me this level of blind access.
Dude, AI has been shown to execute queries on coworkers env files, extract master keys, decrypt variables and push to production.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have only worked in startups and I have been an early engineer in both of them. I would always get high privileges within a short time where I would have the access to create and delete resources. I don't think it's that uncommon.
But the correct way to do it is to have a separate account with more privileges, and only give AI access to your standard developer account
I have personally seen AI bypass this multiple times.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#36[deleted]
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#37If the developer can have a local copy of the monorepo it's not a "large" codebase.
If your codebase can’t fit on a single developer dev machine it’s too big.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#38I don’t agree with the statement about indexing codebase: it works pretty well for IDEs like PHPstorm or other jetbrains IDEs
And Claude Code can use Jetbrain's MCP to use that index.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#39> Claude Code navigates a codebase the way a software engineer would: it traverses the file system, reads files, uses grep to find exactly what it needs, and follows references across the codebase. It operates locally on the developer’s machine and doesn’t require a codebase index to be built, maintained, or uploaded to a server.... > Agentic search avoids those failure modes. There's no embedding pipeline or central…
The answer is in the introduction:
> Claude Code is running in production across multi-million-line monorepos, decades-old legacy systems, distributed architectures spanning dozens of repositories (…)
So it is optimized for the general case, using robust tooling that works everywhere, especially when large & messy.
That being said, your remark is right and for well organised smaller repo’s there’s better tooing it can and should use. But I think it does, at least Codex does is my case so I guess Claude does it to. For example Codex use ‘go doc’ first before doing greps.
Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be using a different CC. Or what they’re writing here is correct, and it’s all due to the CLAUDE.md file that I only occassionally yell at claude.
Hmm please share more. I have had the max CC sub since it came out. Religiously follow all of Boris/Cats advice but still struggle with it. Meanwhile a really badly written AGENTS.md will still get the work done.
I find that most “techniques” are basically user hallucinations. Simple plan-write-refactor loops and trivial CLAUDE/AGENTS.md, generated by the harness itself, work nicely. Maaaaaaaaaybe write a skill or two, but usually it’s better to just write a script.