Claude Code with a codebase you did not write: the setup that works

Claude Code with a codebase you didn't write: the setup that works Using Claude Code on your own project is one thing. Using it on code you inherited - legacy systems, acquired repos, someone else's "temporary" solution that became permanent infrastructure - is a different challenge. The agent is good at reading code. It's less good at understanding the implicit decisions embedded in code that's been evolving for years. The context dump problem You can't paste 50,000 lines of legacy code as context. You have to curate.