Sommer PanageBeen having Claude Code giving me "assignments" to help me learn a new (huge) code base and tbh it's working REALLY well. As a manager it's important I understand the technology my team builds, but I'm rarely writing much shipping code these days. I'm someone that learns by doing, so being able to plow thru a code base like a college CS assignment and by the end of the day have a solid understanding of how it works is a really cool use case!
Jason Ji@sommer Oh dang this is an awesome idea I never considered and I have a codebase to learn currently too. Do you just have it direct you to places in the code to read, or have it give you tasks to actually implement in some way? Or just “give me some assignments to help me learn this codebase” and see what Claude comes up with?
@ObjectiveJi First I ask it for an overview of the code–a "guided tour," then I follow that tour. If I find it made errors I correct it as well. Then once I feel like I understand the structure, I ask for an "assignment as if this were a CS class where I needed to learn this framework/app" – I request it to give me a series of exercises progressing in difficultly. If I encounter things along the way that confuse me, I ask for clarification or for it to modify the exercise to teach me that thing.