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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

#131
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harnesses do fix it IMO - it’s why Claude code and Codex had a massive jump in alleged productivity on release and then seems to have flatlined. But a custom harness _would_ allow you to do things like “on every message, run lint validation and tests”. That in and of itself would be wildly useful.

a colleague using OpenCode was telling me it has linting/formatting configurable at harness level and I can't see why this is in every harness

Honestly - I think it's because it goes against the "vibe" part of the tooling - why do you care what the code looks like as long as when you run it it does what you want it to do?

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#132

Earlier 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

That's one way to do it, how about backup to a remote location every hour? There's more than one way to be careful.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#133
post #79

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…

> Am I using it wrong?

I stopped using `/init` and having CLAUDE|AGENTS.md files that explained the codebase. The only thing I kept was how it should explore the codebase and use `git log` when researching, which is probably redundant too. I can't figure it out either.

The codebase I work on is roughly 100k LOC so idk if it is considered large. Personally it's the largest repo I have worked on.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#134

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).

And not only startups...

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#136
> How claud code works in large codebases?

Simple - It even eats up to 35% five hour usage limit in first prompt even on small projects and then there's 5 minutes time out for you to respond quickly or caches would go bust and you'll pay another 12% to 15% on the next prompt.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#138
post #136

> How claud code works in large codebases? Simple - It even eats up to 35% five hour usage limit in first prompt even on small projects and then there's 5 minutes time out for you to respond quickly or caches would go bust and you'll pay another 12% to 15% on the next prompt.

The article listed explains how to avoid this. If you naively turn it loose on a big code base, yes, you’ll burn a lot of tokens while it tries to find stuff.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#139
post #95
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever work on a AAA game?

That probably mostly assets, no?

Probably, but you want to version control assets too.

People usually mention git-lfs at this point, but that is always annoying to use in practice. There is also shallow-clones and sparse-checkouts, but these only mitigate the problem as there is no way around cloning at least one revision completely with git.

Re: How Claude Code works in large codebases

#140
post #136

> How claud code works in large codebases? Simple - It even eats up to 35% five hour usage limit in first prompt even on small projects and then there's 5 minutes time out for you to respond quickly or caches would go bust and you'll pay another 12% to 15% on the next prompt.

The article listed explains how to avoid this. If you naively turn it loose on a big code base, yes, you’ll burn a lot of tokens while it tries to find stuff.

If I set a regular expression as watcher on a filesytem to notify me if any file changes and I write that in go and assuming regular expression isn't buggy nor its implementation - and then I write rules in a file (as regex) then there's snowball in hell of a chance that it would misnotify or miscategorize anything.

Are LLMs that super reliable in their output already with all the guardrails around?

Don't think so. Hence it is snake oil just like dozens of harnesses.

It might behave differently than specified and a human is required to validate every output carefully or else.

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