The highest quality codebase

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

It works great in C# (where you have strong typing + strict compiler).

Try this:

Have a look at xyz.cs. Do a full audit of the file and look for any database operations in loops that can be pre-filtered.

Or:

Have a look at folder /folderX/ and add .AsNoTracking() to all read-only database queries. When you are done, run the compiler and fix the errors. Only modify files in /folderX/ and do not go deeper in the call hierarchy. Once you are done, do a full audit of each file and make sure you did not accidentally added .AsNoTracking() to tracked entities. Do no create any new files or make backups, I already created a git branch for you. Do not make any git commits.

Or:

Have a look at the /Controllers/ folder. Do a full audit of each controller file and make sure there are no hard-coded credentials, username, password or tokens.

Or: Have a look at folder /folderX/. Find any repeated hard-coded values, magic values and literals that will make good candidates to extract to Constants.cs. Make sure to add XML comments to the Constants.cs file to document what the value is for. You may create classes within Constants.cs to better group certain values, like AccountingConstants or SystemConstants etc.

These kinds of tasks works amazing in claude code an can often be one shotted. Make sure you check your git diffs - you cannot and should not blame AI for shitty code - its your name next to the commit, make sure it is correct. You can even ask claude to review the file with you afterwards. I've used this kind of approach to greatly increase our overall code quality & performance tuning - I really don't understand all the negative comments as this approach has chopped down days worth of refactorings to a couple of minutes and hours.

In places where you see your coding assistant is slow or making mistakes or it is going line by line where you know a simple regex find/replace would work instantly, ask it to help you create a shell script as a tool for itself to call, that does task xyz that it can call. I've made a couple of scripts that uses this approach that Claude can call locally to fix certain code pattern in 5 seconds that would've taken it (and me checking it) 30 mins at least and it wont eat up context or tokens.