Comment by marhee
10 hours ago
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 can and should use. But I think it does, at least Codex does is my case so I guess Claude does it to. For example Codex use ‘go doc’ first before doing greps.
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.
The large majority of coding is maintenance work, not greenfield development. Even if you are doing greenfield development, it won't be long before it is maintenance.
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> So it is optimized for the general case, using robust tooling that works everywhere
Where "robust tooling" is "grep with various regexes while completely missing the big picture even in small codebases"
Nothing wrong with "grep with various regexes".
And in my experience it hardly ever "misses the big picture". When it misses is small stuff I'd miss myself quite often anyway.
grep with regexp misses any and all context. Especially in large codebases (and if terms are somewhat generic like "account", which can find hundreds of functions).
So, on small codebases it misses "small" things like "I've tried to re-implement the same frigging component 15 times already" or "just because it says account doesn't mean it is any way shape or form related to account billing".
On larger codebases it becomes worse and worse, since there's more functionality, more code, and agent's context window gets polluted very quickly.