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How Claude Code works in large codebases

claude.com

61–70 of 191 posts

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#61

A lot of words about nothing. Meanwhile we are still waiting for these statements to come true: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurism... https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc Accountability, anyone?

He would be right if claude code was written by a team of humans. The AI written blob is slowing progress.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#63

A lot of words about nothing. Meanwhile we are still waiting for these statements to come true: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurism... https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc Accountability, anyone?

This is already the case for many startups. In fact, the figure might be closer to 100%. The work shifts to requirements analysis, high-level specifications, and final review instead (after AI code review).

Yeah I'm working on one of those now that a 3rd-party vendor cranked out for us. I spent all day ripping out an endpoint that did 98% of what another endpoint did and should never have existed. I also ripped out 80 lines of code that looked like this:

const sqlStatement = (!params.mostRecentOnly) ? {giant SQL statement} : {identical giant SQL statement + 'LIMIT 1' at the end}

AI never met a problem that can't be solved with more code. Need some data in a slightly different structure? Don't try to modify an existing endpoint, just build a new one! Need to access a field that's buried in a JSON object in the database? Just create a new column, but don't bother removing the field from the JSON object. The more sources of truth, the merrier! When it comes time to update, just write more code to update the field everywhere it lives!

Factor out the extra sources of truth you say? Good luck scanning the most verbose front-end you've ever seen to make sure nothing is looking at the source you want to remove. In the beginning of big projects, you have to be absolutely ruthless about keeping complexity down so it doesn't get out of control later. AI is terrible at keeping complexity down.

My goal is to halve the lines of code from what the vendor turned over to us. One baby step at a time.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#64
post #52

This is really a zero information blog post. I want to know how they use the LSP to improve their understanding of the code base. Would be great if it was open source for us to review. A post like this should be providing people with some reassurance about Claude's ability to understand code at a large scale. It's mostly fluff. Edit: so I did some googling to dig around for thoughts on LSP performance and integration…

Really? I thought it explained the point that harnessing for agentic search of a large code base is more beneficial than RAG-indexing a monorepo.

[deleted]

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#65

This is really a zero information blog post. I want to know how they use the LSP to improve their understanding of the code base. Would be great if it was open source for us to review. A post like this should be providing people with some reassurance about Claude's ability to understand code at a large scale. It's mostly fluff. Edit: so I did some googling to dig around for thoughts on LSP performance and integration…

[flagged]

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already the case for many startups. In fact, the figure might be closer to 100%. The work shifts to requirements analysis, high-level specifications, and final review instead (after AI code review).

Yeah I'm working on one of those now that a 3rd-party vendor cranked out for us. I spent all day ripping out an endpoint that did 98% of what another endpoint did and should never have existed. I also ripped out 80 lines of code that looked like this: const sqlStatement = (!params.mostRecentOnly) ? {giant SQL statement} : {identical giant SQL statement + 'LIMIT 1' at the end} AI never met a problem that can't be solv…

If only we had this tech back when managers were looking at how many lines of code you were committing weekly as a performance metric.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#67

A lot of words about nothing. Meanwhile we are still waiting for these statements to come true: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurism... https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc Accountability, anyone?

This is already the case for many startups. In fact, the figure might be closer to 100%. The work shifts to requirements analysis, high-level specifications, and final review instead (after AI code review).

The first link states literally

"AI will take over almost all the work of software engineers (SWEs) end - to - end in just 6 - 12 months!"

What you describe is >50% of the job of SWEs, even when they write all code by hand.

Are you saying that "for many start-ups", this isn't done by SWE's but by some other career type or are you implying that it's just the code written (and first review) is replaced by AI?

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#68

I don't have any LSP's hooked up to CC yet (going to fix that today), or particularly sophisticated CLAUDE.md files. So, if I've read this post correctly, that means that CC is navigating my codebase today by sending lots of it up to a model, and building an understanding. Is that correct? Did I misunderstand it? I kinda suspected there was more local inference going on somehow -- partly because the iteration times a…

I think that's correct. Which is kinda funny, I remember 10y ago that I was heavily relying on IntelliJ features to understand new codebases (jump to definition, find all usages of a function, navigate from SQL to the table in database tab etc.).

It turns out, that for a machine, find and grep is all that's required.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like they're still giving the model the keys to the kingdom, which is my point, stop giving the model the avenue to do catastrophic mistakes, it makes no sense.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#70

A lot of words about nothing. Meanwhile we are still waiting for these statements to come true: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurism... https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc Accountability, anyone?

I mean, since Opus 4.6 came out, that rings more and more true. You still have to babysit the output, do some planning and be proactive about ways to do things better… but 80-90% isn’t out of the question if you’re in the domains that are well represented in the training data, e.g. if you’re writing a lot of CRUD functionality as a web dev.

Companies will definitely expect devs to ship more with the same headcount, oftentimes either won’t hire juniors to train them up or will straight up do layoffs, sometimes the AI just being a convenient scapegoat. We kind of can’t ignore that either, sure a lot of those companies will be shooting themselves in the foot, but livelihoods will be impacted a bunch.

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