Comment by andai

5 hours ago

Nice, this sounds great. I want to mention a related issue here, which is that on small codebases, Claude spends a lot of time looking for stuff when it could have just dumped the whole codebase into the context in one go and used very little tokens.

I found a nice workaround which is that you can just dump the whole directory into context, as a startup hook. So then Claude skips the "fumble around blindly in the dark" portion of every task. (I've also seen a great project that worked on bigger repos where it'll give the model an outline with stubs, though I forget what it was called.)

This is true, agents just don't know a lot about the things they're looking at, e.g., the number of files, file sizes, etc.

Although for small codebases it also holds that whatever you would like to find it easy to find, so search still might help you with cost