> Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".

In principle, you should not need the source code: the AI should be able to answer by examining the binaries.

I mostly work with Python, and often coding agents answer questions about dependencies for me just by digging around in the site-packages folder in whatever virtual environment they have access to.

The "clone X and tell me" trick is something I mostly use on my phone - I can answer questions about pretty much any piece of software on GitHub with a regular Claude session, no coding agent needed.