alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
Even 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.
The article does have an entire paragraph about LSPs and how Claude can use them.
That's the question, innit? Dumped into a codebase and given a ticket, what's the fastest way to get your bearings and do the ticket? It's gonna depend on the codebase and the ticket, but it would be an interesting contest to see what tools people have. Some form of grep, sped up using an index, is going to get a skilled operator pretty far, but more complex tools for more complex tickets, eg fix something subtle, like a bug that only manifests on Tuesdays in 2% of requests from Poland, I imagine more advanced tools would help the programmer figure it out faster.
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It works exactly the way I'd work. I have learned to navigate large codebases before LSPs existed. I used vim for many years and would grep to find the relevant files. When I first tried Claude Code last year, I was like WTF, it's going exactly what I'd be doing.