How Claude Code works in large codebases

(claude.com)

51 points | by shenli3514 1 hour ago

6 comments

  • thinkindie 30 minutes ago
    I don’t agree with the statement about indexing codebase: it works pretty well for IDEs like PHPstorm or other jetbrains IDEs
  • belZaah 50 minutes ago
    How 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 49 minutes 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.

      • nibbleyou 3 minutes ago
        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.
      • belZaah 30 minutes ago
        Exactly. 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.
  • tex0 5 minutes ago
    If the developer can have a local copy of the monorepo it's not a "large" codebase.
  • wood_spirit 29 minutes ago
    I’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 27 minutes ago
      You can easily inspect the full requests it makes to the API which contains the full system prompt, tools, tool calls, etc.
      • sprobertson 7 minutes ago
        or easier, open ~/.claude/projects/[project]/[session].jsonl (excluding the system prompt)
  • Tsarp 46 minutes ago
    Wondering 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.

    • Reebz 16 minutes ago
      The influencer economy trades on hype, on frenzy, and ultimately, eyeballs. The more the better.

      They want you feel like you’re missing out. They want you to switch. Being boring is far more productive. Pin your versions. Stick to stable releases and avoid the nightlies.

      Significant noise created from 4.6 to 4.7 Opus transition has caused some to interpret this as signal. Excluding certain genuine and real bugs, the noise about perceived quality falling dramatically was noise. Influencers doing influencing turned it into “signal”. The reality was that if you had strong planning and spec driven development it ranged from manageable to non-existent.

      The vast majority of the people I know and work with have not switched off CC or their Max sub.

    • paustint 6 minutes ago
      I have a choice and have not moved to codex (100/mo personal + my employer pays for a subscription). I try codex here and there and it seems to go off the rails every time. I have had some good experiences with codex, but generally trying to get something big accomplished it doesn't work out.

      But I may not have paid enough to get the full real experience with codex

    • sho 3 minutes ago
      > stop bleeding on fixed cost subscription plans

      What bleeding? Anthropic wants as much of that "bleeding" as possible. The interaction data gathered from CC subscription usage of their models goes directly into their RL training, it's invaluable and they are more than happy to lose money on the inference to get it. That data is what xAI was recently willing to pay $10b to cursor to get.

      They want you to use Claude Code. They hate other UI surfaces like OpenCode etc purely because they lose control over that data, so they're subsidizing the inference without getting what they actually want, the data (they still get some of it of course, but it's much less ergonomic for them. Those tools often abstract away the subagent calls, for example). OpenCode can collect that data themselves, so by allowing subscription there, Anthropic sees itself as subsidizing another org getting that data. Hard no.

      And tools like OpenClaw are useless because they're mechanical and don't represent actual users interacting with the service - again, subsidizing but not getting the reward.

      It's all very simple once you understand their motivations.

    • periodjet 35 minutes ago
      > Everyone with a choice has mostly moved on to codex

      Ha!

    • Aeolun 41 minutes ago
      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.
      • Tsarp 29 minutes ago
        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.
        • zarzavat 9 minutes ago
          Apologies but what is a Boris Cat?
    • SpicyLemonZest 24 minutes ago
      I think it's a good rule of thumb that if you find yourself saying everyone prefers this model or that model you're in a bubble. I've made this mistake before, I used to go around saying everyone knew Claude was the only model for serious professional use, but I was wrong.
      • sigmar 13 minutes ago
        I always assume that people making those comments on HN are trying to convince others to switch to their model. Surely no one actually believes their friend circle is a representative sample of the hundreds of millions of people that use these LLMs?
    • ghiculescu 13 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • jdw64 7 minutes ago
    [dead]