Paper 2 · Question 9

A: This assumes the developer already knows which 15 classes are involved. If the developer knew the full scope, they would not need Claude Code's help understanding the pipeline. The issue is that Claude Code's initial exploration was too shallow.

B: The Explore subagent is purpose-built for verbose, thorough codebase discovery. It systematically follows references, traces inheritance, and maps control flow across files — exactly what is needed for a complex event-driven pipeline. Regular Claude Code defaults to efficient, minimal reads; the Explore subagent prioritises comprehensive discovery.

C: Plan mode can safely explore a codebase before you commit to changes, but it runs in the main conversation and drives toward a change plan. Here the developer needs thorough, verbose discovery of current behaviour, which the Explore subagent isolates and summarises without exhausting the main context, so the Explore subagent is the better fit.

D: Splitting analysis across sessions loses the cross-package context needed to trace the callback chains and inheritance hierarchies. The pipeline's complexity comes from how the 4 packages interact, which requires a single comprehensive analysis.