Either you need to understand how your codebase works or you don’t.

Claude can write the code for you but it can’t understand it for you. That part has to happen at human speeds.

There are cases where you don’t have to understand everything, but I think that’s a more nuanced question.

All of the above is true even if Claude writes perfect code.

> Claude can write the code for you but it can’t understand it for you

Part of the problem is that Claude can go spelunking in a spaghetti codebase far faster than us humans. It doesn't necessarily help you understand the project, but if you farm that understanding out to Claude, you can keep working long after the codebase has become unusable for humans...

> Either you need to understand how your codebase works or you don’t.

It's an interesting point. We can also think about it perhaps as a non binary thing - you need X amount of understanding in a specific codebase to be effective. Even before LLMs in large codebases no one understood it all; but we at least mostly understood our own PRs and our own areas of expertise in the codebase.

My experience conflicts with this assertion. I've used Claude to achieve an understanding of two large codebases (that I mostly wrote, and certainly came up with most of the concepts therein) to the point that it's far superior to my understanding. I now get it to explain things to me that I have long forgotten.