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How Claude Code works in large codebases

claude.com

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Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#71

Post by sumitkumar »

marhee wrote: post #39
jwilliams wrote: post #26

> 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 ca…

But the general use case is not the most efficient for a greenfield to-be fully managed by an agentic system code-base. It is built to be good around the scaffold(programming like humans) and not the actual problem space.

Anthropic's target should be a codebase designed for agentic comprehension from the first commit. Here the codebase adapts to the agent. You can enforce conventions, structured metadata, semantic indexing, explicit dependency graphs. Whatever makes the agent's job trivial rather than heroic.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#72

Post by prodigycorp »

0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #65
prodigycorp wrote: post #46

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]

My complaint is about how there's not enough information in the blog post. The title of the post is "How Claude Code works in large codebases". 1521 of 18135 characters is dedicated to expanding on the premise of the title.

My criticism is fair. This is not an engineering blog post, it's purely marketing.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#73

Post by jameson »

nopinsight wrote: post #57
hansmayer wrote: post #53

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).

> many startups

which startups? I'm genuinely curious

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#74

Post by 0123456789ABCDE »

ares623 wrote: post #31

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".

what if this magical harness is just: experienced operator† + claude code + official plugins + opus 4.7 + max effort ?

† swe with practical experience, a code wrangler if you will

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#75

Post by [deleted] »

martypitt wrote: post #55

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…

[deleted]

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#76

Post by Rapzid »

thinkindie wrote: post #8

I don’t agree with the statement about indexing codebase: it works pretty well for IDEs like PHPstorm or other jetbrains IDEs

It's an odd statement. AI slop? GitHub Copilot has pretty good local indexing too. It's not a super hard problem to put code into a vector DB..

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#77

Post by 0123456789ABCDE »

prodigycorp wrote: post #72
0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

My complaint is about how there's not enough information in the blog post. The title of the post is "How Claude Code works in large codebases". 1521 of 18135 characters is dedicated to expanding on the premise of the title. My criticism is fair. This is not an engineering blog post, it's purely marketing.

you shoouldn't expect a corpo blog to read like an engineering one

try this instead: https://anthropic.com/engineering

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#78

Post by prodigycorp »

0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #77
prodigycorp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My complaint is about how there's not enough information in the blog post. The title of the post is "How Claude Code works in large codebases". 1521 of 18135 characters is dedicated to expanding on the premise of the title. My criticism is fair. This is not an engineering blog post, it's purely marketing.

you shoouldn't expect a corpo blog to read like an engineering one try this instead: https://anthropic.com/engineering

Perhaps, but I'm commenting on a blog post called "How Claude Code works in large codebases". That's an interesting question to me. I had hoped there was a more interesting answer.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#79

Post by jameson »

Why can't Claude Code generate effective harness for us by inspecting the code base?

I tried defining CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md), skills, plugins, but I'm not getting the effectiveness others claim to be. LSP plugin for example, CC doesn't to use LSP's symbol renaming and edits file one by one slowly, or it does not invoke the skill when I explicitly ask to remember to invoke when prompt contains a specific clue.

Am I using it wrong? Is there a robust example I can copy the harness?

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#80

Post by sinsudo »

Just an anecdote: I was designing a project for LLMs onboarding and orchestration. Claude chose to read only the first 40 lines of each file. Later, in another session, looking for causes of low quality result, Claude detected the fault and changed the code to perform an AST analysis, so now the analyzer takes documentation lines and functions signature (input/output) as input.

Claude's initial approach was really poor. One has to wonder how many times Claude code has to be modified/reviewed for improvement, or whether it is possible at all to make good code with it.

Edited: Generalization: Claude can fix a localized, identifiable poor decision (e.g., "only reading first 40 lines") because the fault is discrete and traceable to one piece of code.

But real software quality problems often arise from many small, individually reasonable decisions that collectively produce bad outcomes. No single one is obviously "the fault." In that scenario, a tool that generates low-quality building blocks piecemeal may never converge on good code, because each piece seems fine in isolation.

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