[Scenario 4: Developer Productivity with Claude] You are building developer productivity tooling on the Claude Agent SDK: helping engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate, and automate repetitive tasks — using the built-in tools (Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Grep, Glob) plus MCP servers.

Asked how the billing module works, the agent Reads dozens of files upfront and exhausts its context before answering. What is the correct exploration strategy for building codebase understanding?

Question

[Scenario 4: Developer Productivity with Claude] You are building developer productivity tooling on the Claude Agent SDK: helping engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate, and automate repetitive tasks — using the built-in tools (Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Grep, Glob) plus MCP servers.

Asked how the billing module works, the agent Reads dozens of files upfront and exhausts its context before answering. What is the correct exploration strategy for building codebase understanding?

Accepted Answer

Work incrementally: Grep to find entry points (key functions, imports, error strings), then Read selectively to follow imports and trace flows from those anchors

Answer

Read files in alphabetical order and stop at the context limit

Answer

Ask the developer to explain the module instead

Answer

Read only the README and reason from documentation

Paper 3 · Question 33

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