[kevin42]

This isn't meant as a criticism, or to doubt your experience, but I've talked to a few people who had experiences like this. But, I helped them get Claude code setup, analyze the codebase and document the architecture into markdown (edit as needed after), create an agent for the architecture, and prompt it in an incremental way. Maybe 15-30 minutes of prep. Everyone I helped with this responded with things like "This is amazing", "Wow!", etc.

For some things you can fire up Claude and have it generate great code from scratch. But for bigger code bases and more complex architecture, you need to break it down ahead of time so it can just read about the architecture rather than analyze it every time.

[ryandrake]

Is there any good documentation out there about how to perform this wizardry? I always assumed if you did /init in a new code base, that Claude would set itself up to maximize its own understanding of the code. If there are extra steps that need to be done, why don't Claude's developers just add those extra steps to /init?

[kevin42]

Not that I have seen, which is probably a big part of the disconnect. Mostly it's tribal knowledge. I learned through experimentation, but I've seen tips here and there. Here's my workflow (roughly)

> Create a CLAUDE.md for a c++ application that uses libraries x/y/z

[Then I edit it, adding general information about the architecture]

> Analyze the library in the xxx directory, and produce a xxx_architecture.md describing the major components and design

> /agent [let claude make the agent, but when it asks what you want it to do, explain that you want it to specialize in subsystem xxx, and refer to xxx_architecture.md

Then repeat until you have the major components covered. Then:

> Using the files named with architecture.md analyze the entire system and update CLAUDE.md to use refer to them and use the specialized agents.

Now, when you need to do something, put it in planning mode and say something like:

> There's a bug in the xxx part of the application, where when I do yyy, it does zzz, but it should do aaa. Analyze the problem and come up with a plan to fix it, and automated tests you can perform if possible.

Then, iterate on the plan with it if you need to, or just approve it.

One of the most important things you can do when dealing with something complex is let it come up with a test case so it can fix or implement something and then iterate until it's done. I had an image processing problem and I gave it some sample data, then it iterated (looking at the output image) until it fixed it. It spent at least an hour, but I didn't have to touch it while it worked.

[HDThoreaun]

> if you did /init in a new code base, that Claude would set itself up to maximize its own understanding of the code.

This is definitely not the case, and the reason anthropic doesnt make claude do this is because its quality degrades massively as you use up its context. So the solution is to let users manage the context themselves in order to minimize the amount that is "wasted" on prep work. Context windows have been increasing quite a bit so I suspect that by 2030 this will no longer be an issue for any but the largest codebases, but for now you need to be strategic.