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How Claude Code works in large codebases
- belZaah 5mo agoHow 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?
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago> 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.
- belZaah 5mo agoExactly. So is that level of obvious hygiene where the bar is or is it somewhere else. What ticks me off is the audacity of blanket claims without an attempt to even remotely state why it’s said this is a list of successful patterns and what does success mean. We’re just supposed to eat it up, because, you know, Claude.
- nibbleyou 5mo agoI 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.
- indentit 5mo agoBut 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
- digitaltrees 5mo agoI have personally seen AI bypass this multiple times.
- Terr_ 5mo agoWe kinda need to architect things with the assumption that all token-output from an LLM can be unpredictably sneaky and malicious. Alas, humans suck at constant vigilance, we're built to avoid it whenever possible, so a "reverse centaur" future of "do what the AI says but only if you see it's good" is going to suck.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoI built my own IDE to replace vscode / cursor so I could design the harness and ensure that the model tool access was secure and limited. But the rest of the industry is YOLO
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoSounds 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.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoIf you’re message is in response to me, which I think it is, I deliberately don’t give access to credentials and env variables. I’ve worked to create restrictions and seen AI models use very interesting methods to bypass them. Even now my prompt says the AI must verify the path of the files it intends to edit, and get permission before editing one file at a time and only after permission. I stop it from ignoring those rules once a day at least.
- ramraj07 5mo agoThe first step I do when I do any meaningful side project is to set up rds with snapshots. So any startup that doesnt do this one basic step already deserves to fail in my opinion. Then next I've used AI agents like crazy, we even have linked mcp servers that let it query on the dev database. Haven't seen it try deleting everything a single time. I haven't seen any agent try to do anything destructive. Ever. Perhaps its just reflecting an outrageously bad engineer and nothing else.
- eecc 5mo agoI would never have these privileges granted directly to my account. Indeed it’s a good practice to use roles where supported (AWS has them) and explicitly switch when needed
- maccard 5mo agoThe problem with agents is they regularly sidestep the guardrails and do what they want with a script anyway. The number of times I’ve seen Claude try to escape the folder it’s working in, and then for it to write a python script that does exactly what I told it it’s not allowed do supports that. If you use SSO and have an AWS config that Claude is allowed to see to get the correct role in the first place, it will just pick the role and plough on anyway.
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoAnd this is why it is the height of irresponsibility to run LLMs on your system. We know they are unreliable and just make things up; it's extremely foolish to go "yeah I'm going to let that run commands".
- maccard 5mo agoIt's not _really_ any different to running an undocumented third party binary. Is it the height of irresponsibility to run Windows, or VSCode, or Spotify? I think the model we've got now is wrong, and the harnesses should be OS-level sandboxed, and the agents should be running in harness managed sandboxes.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoDude, AI has been shown to execute queries on coworkers env files, extract master keys, decrypt variables and push to production.
- cpursley 5mo agoWhy are important push secrets in a dev env config? Btw humans devs make this same mistake all the time.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoumm lots of providers have cli tools: ‘heroku run rails db:drop —-app {name}’ railway, fly.io etc. so unless you don’t ever use their cli tools locally there’s a vector. Plus CI/CD might also have credentials to do things like run migrations.
- cpursley 5mo agoWell that’s a developer problem, then. We use fly but prod secrets are not saved locally.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoSo you can’t ssh into the pg or database?
- tommy29tmar 5mo ago[flagged]
- Tsarp 5mo agoWondering if enterprises have a modified version of CC that doesnt have to optimize to stop bleeding on fixed cost subscription plans. The article really does not align with the current sentiment. Everyone with a choice has mostly moved on to codex (ofc in this world all it takes is a model update/harness update to turn things around). CC is great at a lot of things, but repeatedly misses out reading on crucial parts of the code base, hallucinates on the work that was done and a bunch of other issues.
- Aeolun 5mo agoYou 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.
- Tsarp 5mo agoHmm 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.
- zarzavat 5mo agoApologies but what is a Boris Cat?
- polotics 5mo agoBoris Cherny and Cat Wu are the lead devs of CC at Anthropic who unsurprisingly talk their book and find so many ways to justify tokenmaxing. As the product they deliver is greenfield and in the newest of domain spaces, there is a serious halo-effect to consider. On a side note, at a company I know the devs are split between Stick to Copilot inside visual studio - suspiciously cheap Opus quotas there + they read their code pi coding agent + control all the things my way - each their own way Claude Code + it's magic - you mean it did that to my prompt!
- thinkindie 5mo agoI don’t agree with the statement about indexing codebase: it works pretty well for IDEs like PHPstorm or other jetbrains IDEs
- selcuka 5mo agoAnd Claude Code can use Jetbrain's MCP to use that index.
- njovin 5mo agoPHPStorm's indexing is incredible. Aside from a scant few times it's been corrupted, which is easily corrected, I've never gotten stale results. Although if you've ever used Claude's search tool, you'll be unsurprised that the team knows nothing about indexing. How a company, whose primary product is text-based chat, doesn't allow users to easily perform text search on said chat is beyond comprehension.
- sumitkumar 5mo ago[dead]
- Rapzid 5mo agoIt'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..
- wood_spirit 5mo agoI’m super interested to know what the back and forth between models and tools really looks like in practice. Are there any much more detailed walkthroughs of how it works and how it decides the tools to use and the grep to use etc and what the conversations actually look like? In the UI you see just enough to know it’s doing something but you don’t really see the jumps it’s making offscreen.
- weird-eye-issue 5mo agoYou can easily inspect the full requests it makes to the API which contains the full system prompt, tools, tool calls, etc.
- sprobertson 5mo agoor easier, open ~/.claude/projects/[project]/[session].jsonl (excluding the system prompt)
- weird-eye-issue 5mo agoDoesn't really seem easier and it's in a harder to read format
- dtang2718 5mo agoI had a hard time understanding the claude logs and built a light weight html visualizer for myself. Here is the github if anyone is interested https://github.com/dtang27182/claude-code-log-visualizer https://github.com/dtang27182/claude-code-log-visualizer
- ralfhn 5mo agoCodex is open source if you’re interested https://github.com/openai/codex https://github.com/openai/codex
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- tex0 5mo agoIf the developer can have a local copy of the monorepo it's not a "large" codebase.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoIf your codebase can’t fit on a single developer dev machine it’s too big.
- ramraj07 5mo agoYou mean like Teslas multi terabyte repo is not normal?
- rtpg 5mo agoI think it's obvious that multi terabyte repos are not the norm.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoIt couldn’t be broken in to domain specific components? Listen, I am a rails developer, so a monolith doesn’t scare me, and yet, there are limits. Why does it need to be a multi terabyte monolith?
- mrweasel 5mo agoHow did they even manage to generate a terabyte sized repo, that's crazy. Do they have something written up on how it's structured and why they'd even go that route?
- 1718627440 5mo agoA terabyte is ~220 thousand books (1000 pages, 50 rows, 100 columns) uncompressed. VCS generally store objects compressed.
- nfg 5mo agoEver work on a AAA game?
- jwilliams 5mo ago> 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 centralized index to maintain as thousands of engineers commit new code. Each developer's instance works from the live codebase. The frame of "the way a software engineer would" and the conclusion seem at odds. I'd love to be schooled otherwise? I use autocomplete/LSPs all the time and they're useful. That's an index? Why wouldn't Claude be able to use one? Also a "software engineer" remembers the codebase - that's definitely a RAG. I have a lot of muscle memory to find the file I need through an auto-completed CMD+P. It doesn't need to particularly be real-time across thousands of engineers -- just the branch I'm on. It's rare that I'd be navigating a codebase from first-principles traversal. It would usually be a new codebase and in those cases it's definitely not what I'd call an optimal experience.
- khuey 5mo agoThe article does have an entire paragraph about LSPs and how Claude can use them.
- hibikir 5mo agoEven 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.
- lukaslalinsky 5mo agoI still think the best process with Claude Code is: 1) ask it to gather context that you know is relevant 2) only then ask it to do whatever you want it to do. If you do it the other way around, it will over research, over think and generally make more of a mess.
- ares623 5mo agoLots 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".
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo agowhat 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
- Kwpolska 5mo ago+ an infinite supply of free tokens + convincing Claude to just keep working overnight.
- porridgeraisin 5mo agoThere you have a verifier though. As in you have test cases (which are written in JS and thus do not need to be translated). The moment you have a verifier signal LLMs become extremely reliable. Now of course they can reward hack your test cases but in a large codebase with many tests it becomes the only small thing you have to worry about.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ufish235 5mo agoHow important are Claude.MD files when they don’t even describe (with concrete terms) what should even go into each one?
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo agothe fish: you can read about that here: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices#write-an-effective-claude-md https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices#write-an-effe... the fishing: 1) install the official `skill-creator`; 2) use that with the above link to create `claude-md-improver`; 3) improve the skill by tasking claude with researching the topic of `progressive-disclosure`, in the official docs; 4) point the new skill at you CLAUDE.md file and accept the changes
- ufish235 5mo agoSeems crazy how they suggest a lightweight CLAUDE.md (shows 4 lines) but the /init command they suggest creates 100 lines of Markdown.
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- prodigycorp 5mo agoThis 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. the author of bun has a tweet about saying that they are a big drag on performance for no real gain and virtually all of the replies agree. Anyone else have any experience/thoughts? https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2017704989540684176 https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2017704989540684176
- hbarka 5mo agoReally? 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 5mo ago[deleted]
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago[flagged]
- prodigycorp 5mo agoMy 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.
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo agoyou shoouldn't expect a corpo blog to read like an engineering one try this instead: https://anthropic.com/engineering https://anthropic.com/engineering
- hbarka 5mo agoInteresting that MCP was mentioned over CLI. For production or controlled environments, I would not make MCP the deployment path. I would let MCP help generate or choose commands, but have the actual deployment go through CLI scripts, Git commits, and CI/CD approval.
- hansmayer 5mo agoA lot of words about nothing. Meanwhile we are still waiting for these statements to come true: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565 https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6-months-2025-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurismcom_exactly_six_months_ago_the_ceo_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurism... https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code-will-be-ai-written-in-6-months-6b8060720d97 https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc Accountability, anyone?
- nopinsight 5mo agoThis 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).
- suzzer99 5mo agoYeah 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.
- martypitt 5mo agoI 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 are fairly fast.
- mystifyingpoi 5mo agoI 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.
- Kwpolska 5mo agoA human could get by with just find and grep too. And in both cases, find and grep will be slower and less precise than an IDE's code navigation features.
- Longwelwind 5mo agoAgents use find+grep because it's available everywhere and without any configuration, but they would still be more efficient with LSP. Once LSPs will be more easily configurable for agents, they will use them.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nilirl 5mo agoSo ... the better you explain the codebase to the LLM the better it explains it to you?
- Plywood1 5mo agoClaude clearly wrote this. A lot of fluff, not much substance.
- jameson 5mo agoWhy 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?
- MaxikCZ 5mo agoThis is the pain point that existed for years now and its still not solved at all. "If A, do X. Do B,C,D. Do A" - and it just never uses X because "it forgot". You just cant trust that the time you spend building rules will actually pay off, in fact you can trust that it will fail you sooner or later. RAG, Harness, Skills... all was supposed to fix this, but in reality it never had.
- maccard 5mo agoHarnesses 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.
- agos 5mo agoa 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
- maccard 5mo agoHonestly - 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?
- sinsudo 5mo agoJust 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.
- mikepurvis 5mo agoI think it's taught to look at source code through a peephole for the sake of context preservation, but I feel like this could be a good use-case for some sub-logic or even a full sub-agent. Like, here sub-agent, you skim that file and tell me a summary, and highlight any areas related to X and Y so that I can look at them in my main context. You can also periodically observe the main work stream and interrupt me if you realise that something in the file you're thinking about is relevant to what I'm working on or might change the direction of what I'm doing.
- sinsudo 5mo agoI think what you suggest is like a local second order approximation, that can help. But, I think that the real problem is a global one, is about architectural taste, how the many local pieces interact and their friction. Currently that demands human expertize.
- Terretta 5mo ago> I think it's taught to look at source code through a peephole for the sake of context preservation Yes, to a (real) fault. Less than one in fifty times it ignores an instruction or piece of data in a file has it seen the instruction or data before ignoring it. The other times, it's done this sampling nonsense. Results are night and day using the 1M token models and reading the full files.
- cdnsteve 5mo agoSmall plug for what I built: You need a code dependency graph: https://github.com/roboticforce/remembrallmcp https://github.com/roboticforce/remembrallmcp Ask "what breaks if I change this?" Saves 98% token usage. Saves 95% tools being called. Runs as an MCP server, works for 8 languages. It just works, you need to try it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- baochillchill 5mo ago[flagged]
- phoebe_builds 5mo ago[dead]
- prymitive 5mo agoWhat I’m curious about is how well LLMs do when they create something from scratch, because so far my experience was with letting it fix issues or add features to existing codebase where I already shaped the general architecture and put in a lot of guardrails. But what if the architecture is unclear and there is nothing letting agent know if change breaks something or not? My only experience with tiny codebase where it did a lot of scaffolding was poor - it did what I asked for, not what I needed. If i did more of the thinking myself I would realise it’s a code that works but doesn’t solve the problem I’m after.
- xiaosong001 5mo ago[flagged]
- whh 5mo agoA lot of words for not much. The harness taxonomy is fine, but anyone using Claude Code already knows CLAUDE.md exists.
- pouyaamreji 5mo agoA long article about nothing, seems written by Claude itself.
- mrasong 5mo ago[dead]
- svara 5mo agoI use Claude Code quite a bit and quite enjoy it, so I'm a bit confused by how often it's mentioned that you should have CLAUDE.md. I mean: If there was something you could add to the prompt to consistently increase performance why isn't it in the system prompt already? If it's all about clarifying a couple of local idiosyncrasies, shouldn't it be able to quickly get them by looking through the repo? Does anyone have an example of a CLAUDE.md that really makes a difference for them? In general, this article would really have profited massively from examples of good applications of those patterns.
- operatingthetan 5mo ago>I mean: If there was something you could add to the prompt to consistently increase performance why isn't it in the system prompt already? I think about this a lot. So far I think we are mostly just being gaslit. That we can influence the AI to be better with a few encouraging words and role playing, actually seems absurd. Maybe there is some element of randomness introduced there or something. All these extra MD files don't seem to do nearly as much for results as people believe they do.
- ubercore 5mo agoThe tokens it uses up clarifying can be saved, and it's often good to write out intentions. For instance, you may be mid-process on cleaning up some architectural pattern, and giving it guidance about where to find docs to follow, etc, are very project-specific.
- sampullman 5mo agoThere's a bunch of stuff I include, depending on the project. Some general ones are commenting style and coding standards. In theory it should be able to do it without that by looking at the repo style, but I haven't found that to be the case (especially with overly verbose/repetitive comments). A specific example in another project is the testing/verification procedure. It's a wasm/WebGPU and the test harness is fairly complex. There are scripts to handle it, but by default Claude will churn for a while to figure it out and sometimes just give up. It definitely saves a lot of tokens/speeds things up.
- lebski88 5mo ago> That also includes codebases running on languages that teams don't always associate with AI coding tools, such as C, C++, C#, Java, PHP. What a strange comment for them to make. Why wouldn't I expect CC to work well with those languages? What languages would I associated it with? Python and Javascript?
- claud_ia 5mo ago[flagged]
- wg0 5mo ago> 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.
- JohnMakin 5mo agoThe 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.
- wg0 5mo agoIf 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.
- vntok 5mo ago> Are LLMs that super reliable in their output already with all the guardrails around? Well, what is your definition of "super reliable in the output", and is it a quantifiable/measurable target or just a feeling? Is it "more than humans", "more than senior developers", "almost perfect", "perfect"? > It might behave differently than specified and a human is required to validate every output carefully or else. Sure, just like meatbag developers. All the security flaws AI finds today were introduced years/decades ago by humans and haven't been found (that we know) by humans in ages.
- wg0 5mo agoIt is quantifiable thing not a feeling. Between ten thousand runs of: ``` const int MAX_COUNT = 10000; printf("I'll count up to %d", MAX_COUNT); for(int i=1; < MAX_COUNT; i++) printf("I'm now counting %d", i); ``` And of the following prompt: ``` You'll count to 10,000. At the start say "I'll count up to 10,000" and then for each number say "I'm now counting <number>" and do not say anything else. Do not miss numbers in between. ``` Which one is going to produce 100% correct results out of a 10,000 run of each? Now don't give me "these are different tools". We all know. I'm talking about reliability and predictability.
- nielsbosma 5mo ago[flagged]
- zihotki 5mo agoI wonder if Anthropic tested their claims on a pro, 5x, 20x subscriptions. When you have infinite amount of free tokens it sure makes sense, you just throw tokens at the problem. But not in a limited usage scenarios it doesn't fly far..
- kramit1288 5mo ago[dead]
- eithed 5mo agoI ask Claude to fix given test: - runs the test what is failing | grep "x|failing" | tail 10 - runs the test again to get the why it's failing message | tail 10 - runs the test again because tail 10 cut off the message every time. What developers do things like this?! I have a skill for it to not do that = save output for whatever test you run into file, read from file using whatever commands you want. Ignores the skill. Same for debugging - something is failing. Instead of debugging given issue to see why it's failing, looking at the results it will look at the code trying to deduce why it's failing. First trace it finds that looks suspicious? "THAT'S IT, I FOUND IT. But let me reconsider." and after 15m it produces summary that is wrong. Put a debug point, look at it, then make your decisions. You have a skill to use for debugging that is phrased to do exactly that! No. I've never seen a human do things like this either. It's maddening. It's as if, puts on tinfoil hat, it's designed to waste your tokens, while eventually accomplishing its task.
- sergiopreira 5mo ago[flagged]
- luodaint 5mo agoAs a result of shipping a working product for six months with Claude Code integrated into SaaS production, the only surviving constraints had all been less than 50 lines: migrations' generation vs execution conventions, authentication flow invariants, internationalization setup rules. Any longer constraints would get either selectively ignored or cause confusion when starting sessions. The important distinction: CLAUDE.md will not explain how the model understands your architecture. Rather, it will prevent certain kinds of regression from happening. "Never create a user without calling the workspace provision step" is the right constraint. "This is how our entire system works" is not – the model learns it from the codebase. The mistake is writing constraints based on an architecture constructed with slop. The sequence is important here.
- Kryscekk 5mo ago[flagged]
- bicepjai 5mo agoAll my stress these days comes from Claude Code not following instructions, and it’s gotten worse as my codebase has grown. Don’t get me wrong, Claude is awesome and I love it. But there’s no way I’d hire Claude Code alone to maintain or add features to my codebase. They keep adding memory entries about past mistakes, but the same issue of ignoring important instructions still happens about 90% of the time. The only way to avoid it is to babysit every job and review the hell out of the output. Claude Code is great at documentation and helping you understand a large codebase, but not at making changes that require understanding the whole thing. Example: I have a registry pattern used for different entities across the codebase — around 10 of them. Claude Code went and implemented 4 separate, independent registries for those entities, even with an explicit rule saying “use this one registry pattern.” It took half a day of shouting at Claude Code to get this simple task right, and I ended up editing it myself to save the stress and time.
- deferredgrant 5mo ago[flagged]
- jb3689 5mo agoYeah, this is how it factually does work, but it’s not great. That’s why so many people are having to build custom tools to fill the gaps
- jahala 5mo ago[dead]
- yc-kraln 5mo agoClaude does much better when I tell it to use ripgrep and ctags ;)
- gameboy 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dimitrismrtzs 5mo agoSo if 100k codebase is considered large, this is how i do it. I keep a documentation folder, one for the backend one for the frontend and i try to keep these as up to date as possible. So every time i start a new feature or try to fix a bug, i tell claude to read what it needs from the documentation first and mention the thing we need to focus on. I dont know if the focus on documentation is even needed that much but with this flow i have seen claude sucessfully do some pretty complicated stuff and not a problem with exploring the codebase.